Beyond the Machine

Abstract

Organizational membership is one of the strongest, yet overlooked, predictors of vote buying across Latin America. We argue that this relationship is driven by the fact that politicians outsource some of their vote-buying efforts to interest associations. In contrast to the existing literature that focuses on party brokers, who are loyal to a single political machine, we introduce the concepts of organizational brokers, who represent interest associations and renegotiate ties to political parties between election cycles, and hybrid brokers, who split their loyalties between an interest association and a single political party. We illustrate the operation of these alternative broker types through case studies of street-vending organizations in an uninstitutionalized party system, Colombia, and peasant organizations in an institutionalized party system, Mexico. Attention to the role of brokers and the organizations that they represent has implications for political accountability, collective action, and the persistence of clientelism.

Bypassing the Enemy: Distributive Politics, Credit Claiming, and Nonstate Organizations in Brazil

“…If the president's party is out of local office, it could take advantage of organizations' provision of service to sway elections in their favor through the exchange of votes for benefits. For example, Holland and Palmer-Rubin (2015) present evidence on the association between organizational membership and vote buying, which could suggest that politicians turn to these organizations to buy their members' votes. This additional path is compatible with the interpretation that nonstate welfare provision reduces opposition's ability to hijack credit: If these organizations are another bolt in the party machine, they are likely to hinder opposition mayors from reaping credit.…”

Rethinking the Study of Electoral Politics in the Developing World: Reflections on the Indian Case

“…Studies of electoral handouts suggest that their impact is marginal and that politicians are well aware of these limitations (Björkman 2014;Chauchard 2018). For politicians, these efforts may instead be about revealing targeting preferences to voters 3 Some scholarship on Latin America also suggests that local fixers are not necessarily partisan actors (Holland and Palmer-Rubin 2015). (Schneider and Sircar 2017), generating reputations for efficacy (Auerbach and Thachil 2018), signaling electoral viability or credibility regarding the promise of future transfers (Björkman 2014;Muñoz 2014) or simply seeming "glamorous" (Jensenius 2017).…”

How Clients Select Brokers: Competition and Choice in India's Slums

“…A burgeoning literature in comparative politics establishes the pervasiveness of political brokers like Pavan, who facilitate the exchange of electoral support for access to goods, services, and protection in clientelistic settings (Nichter 2008; Stokes et al 2013; Camp 2015; Holland and Palmer-Rubin 2015; Szwarcberg 2015; Larreguy, Marshall, and Querubin 2016). While these studies advance our understanding of clientelism, they tend to view machine politics—and the hierarchies of brokers who enable it—from a top-down, party-centered perspective.…”