Clientelism and Political Recruitment in Democratic Transition: Evidence from Romania

Abstract

Legislative recruitment patterns can serve as an important source of information on clientelistic practices of political parties. These practices are often a product of parties' deliberate strategies to foster clientelistic type of linkages between politicians and society. The difficulties of conceptualizing and measuring these practices, which frequently have a highly informal character, impede comparative work on the subject. Current studies offer a number of research strategies to overcome these difficulties, but pay little attention to the potential contribution of political recruitment research in addressing these challenges. 1 Clientelism involves contingent direct exchanges between political actors and both vote-rich and resource-rich constituencies. Refining and modifying conceptual tools developed by political recruitment studies can provide important insights into the dynamics of exchange between political parties and resource-rich constituencies that are especially valuable for understanding party development and the dynamics of political representation in transitional societies. This article uses an original dataset on Romanian parliamentary representatives in order to test a number of propositions about the parties' use of parliamentary recruitment for structuring clientelistic exchanges.Scholars of political recruitment have long argued that social background characteristics are important factors in explaining who gets elected to public office and how elected representatives subsequently behave. Werner Patzelt provides a major overview of this literature and its findings in relation to Western Europe. 2 Parliamentary recruitment has also been one aspect of a more general research agenda on political elites in post-communist Europe. 3

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