Partisanship And Tolerance For Clientelism: Experimental Evidence From Romania

• In Event: Corruption and Institutions in the (Post-)Communist World

Abstract

Clientelism research has begun to move away from supply side to demand side, that is, to study how voters react to clientelistic inducements. Existing studies have tested voter reactions to different types of clientelistic inducements. Yet, voters often evaluate political candidates in a multidimensional setting, and take into account a number of candidate attributes when making their candidate evaluations. Emerging research has shown that partisanship often trumps negative evaluations of candidates in elections. For example, citizens can hold strong anti-corruption views, but yet vote for a co-partisan, but corrupt, candidate (Breitenstein 2019). We examine these questions with evidence from a conjoint experiment conducted in Romania where clientelistic targeting by politicians is prevalent. Our empirical design allows us to test the relative weight that voters place on several candidate attributes, such as different types of electoral inducements and partisanship. Importantly, it also allows us to examine whether co-partisanship moderates voters’ reactions towards clientelistic targeting for the first time in a post-communist setting. These research questions are especially important as the extant literature has suggested that partisanship may be less salient in candidate evaluations in post-communist countries when compared to candidate evaluations in more established democracies.

Authors

• Sergiu Gherghina, University of Glasgow

• Inga A-L Saikkonen, Åbo Akademi University