Do clientelistic machines affect electoral outcomes? Mayoral incumbency as a proxy for machine prowess

Núñez, Lucas

doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2018.08.010

Cited by 12 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 30 publications

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“…As Stokes et al (2013) indicate, these mechanisms have lost effectiveness as reforms for the transparency of electoral processes and polling booth secrecy have gained traction, generating an increasingly less opaque vote. However, due to the refinement of research methods, an incipient literature has emerged that maintains that the harvesting of votes through clientelist practices is limited (Kramon 2016;Núñez 2018;Cantú 2019). These studies pay attention to the electoral advantage obtained by purchasing votes.…”

Section: Party-elector Linkage and Electoral Behaviourmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We know that incumbents enjoy the benefits of the post and are better placed than a challenger to build networks of intermediaries. However, we have less evidence about how this type of clientelist practice impacts citizens' electoral turnout (Nichter 2008;Gans-Morse et al 2009;Szwarcberg 2012) and incumbents' electoral performance (Zittel 2015;Núñez 2018;Lucas 2021).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Clientelism, Turnout and Incumbents’ Performance in Chilean Local Government Elections

Quiroga

Belmar

2022

Social Sciences

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Parties and their leaders are linked programmatically and non-programmatically with citizens, incentivising the latter to vote in elections and seeking to influence their choices. In this paper, we analyse the effects of politician–voter linkages on the electoral performance of incumbent mayors in Chile and on electoral turnout in their municipalities. To measure the linkages, we use personal meetings that mayors hold with citizens. While some mayors use this mechanism to solve problems of general interest (programmatic meetings), others do so to provide bureaucratic advantages or benefits for their constituents (non-programmatic meetings). We use a database of 44,162 personal meetings aggregated from Chile’s 345 municipalities. We argue that increases in the number of meetings positively impact electoral turnout and increase the chances of success for incumbent mayors when they compete for re-election. This effect is particularly significant in the case of electoral performance and the re-election of mayors in municipalities with high levels of rurality. Finally, we report that the meetings not only help mayors to link with their constituents but also help them to publicise their political work.

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Section: Party-elector Linkage and Electoral Behaviourmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clientelism, Turnout and Incumbents’ Performance in Chilean Local Government Elections

Quiroga

Belmar

2022

Social Sciences

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“…In developing democracies, such as those in Latin America, money in politics also finances illicit political activities. Off-the-books payments to voters in exchange for their votes are common before elections (see, e.g., Cantú, 2019; Gingerich, 2014; Stokes, 2005), even though the literature on clientelism rarely studies how politicians finance it (Gingerich, 2013; but see Núñez, 2018). 5 Furthermore, electoral campaigns in Argentina and other developing democracies also rely heavily on on-the-ground services that are paid in cash.…”

Section: The Expenses Of Professional Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Political Corruption Cycles: High-Frequency Evidence from Argentina’s Notebooks Scandal

Figueroa

2020

Comparative Political Studies

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Exploiting daily records documenting how an organization of high-level bureaucrats in Argentina collected bribes and delivered them to party leaders from 2009 to 2015, I detect with unprecedented accuracy a political corruption cycle in narrow temporal windows around national elections. Bureaucrats, on average, collected about $350 thousand more in bribes and were 9.6 percentage points more likely to deliver cash to politicians on days within two weeks before elections than within two weeks after elections. These results are puzzling from the perspective of theories of democratic accountability, which predict that corruption should decrease with electoral proximity, but follow naturally when the factor motivating corruption is the need to finance political expenses. This article’s findings confirm that the motivation behind corruption is often to advance political goals rather than personal enrichment, and that competitive elections shape incentives for corruption in more complex ways than traditionally thought.

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“…Along these lines, a number of electoral RD studies in political science have investigated how the effect of incumbency varies conditional upon the characteristics of the candidate, party, or local context Lopes da Fonseca, 2017;Núñez, 2018;. For instance, finds a stark gender gap in candidates' persistence after losing an election at the local level in California: losing an election decreases the chance of running again by 50% more for women than it does for men, although this gender gap may attenuate in more senior electoral settings .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effect Heterogeneity and the Challenges of Causal Attribution in Regression Discontinuity Designs

Bansak¹,

Nowacki²

2022

Preprint

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Research investigating subgroup differences in treatment effects recovered using regression discontinuity (RD) designs has become increasingly popular. For in- stance, scholars have investigated whether incumbency effects on candidate per- sistence or winning again vary by candidate characteristics (e.g., gender) or local context. Under what conditions can we interpret subgroup differences in treat- ment effects as a causal result of the moderating characteristic? In this study, we explore the difference between RD effect conditionality that is simply associated with versus causally driven by another variable. To make this distinction explicit and formal, we define two alternative estimands and lay out identification as- sumptions required for each, along with corresponding estimation procedures. In doing so, we highlight how investigating RD effect conditionality that is causally driven by another variable involves several additional challenges related to in- terpretation, identification, and estimation. We apply our framework to recent studies and offer practical advice for applied researchers considering these alter- native quantities of interest.

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Do clientelistic machines affect electoral outcomes? Mayoral incumbency as a proxy for machine prowess

Cited by 12 publications

References 30 publications

Clientelism, Turnout and Incumbents’ Performance in Chilean Local Government Elections

Clientelism, Turnout and Incumbents’ Performance in Chilean Local Government Elections

Political Corruption Cycles: High-Frequency Evidence from Argentina’s Notebooks Scandal

Effect Heterogeneity and the Challenges of Causal Attribution in Regression Discontinuity Designs

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