Self-enforcing clientelism

Gallego, Jorge

doi:10.1177/0951629814533840

Cited by 19 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Voters' interests are aligned with the party's. The nature of the goods provided to voters can make clientelism self-enforcing by aligning recipients' interests with the electoral success of the party providing the benefits (Gallego 2015). This is most likely for the subset of exchanges that are iterated, involving benefits that (a) have ongoing payoffs and (b) may cease if another party wins.…”

Section: Imperfectly Solving the Commitment Problem Without Monitoringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clientelism's Red Herrings: Dead Ends and New Directions in the Study of Nonprogrammatic Politics

Hicken

Nathan

2020

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci.

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Research on clientelism often starts from a shared puzzle: How can clientelism be a viable electoral strategy if voters can renege on their commitments to politicians? The standard solution proposed is that politicians resolve this commitment problem with voters through monitoring and enforcement. But there has been startlingly little evidence of individual-level monitoring and enforcement in the recent literature, and many studies now document the use of clientelism even where politicians are aware that the commitment problem remains completely intractable. When read together, recent studies suggest that the focus on resolving the commitment problem is a red herring. Instead, it is increasingly clear that clientelism does not need to be monitored and that the commitment problem does not bind as politicians choose their electoral appeals. New puzzles, motivated by advances in the recent literature, deserve comparatively more attention in future research.

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Section: Imperfectly Solving the Commitment Problem Without Monitoringmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clientelism's Red Herrings: Dead Ends and New Directions in the Study of Nonprogrammatic Politics

Hicken

Nathan

2020

Annu. Rev. Polit. Sci.

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“…The model does not consider politicians competing in elections. This implies, among other things, that we do not consider the credibility problems often addressed in clientelism models (Gallego, 2015;Keefer and Vlaicu, 2008;Robinson and Verdier, 2013;Stokes, 2005). The model is best thought of as representing informal political mobilization rather than formal voting, i.e., a model about grassroots mobilization in the pursuit of broad-based redistribution.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Poor people’s beliefs and the dynamics of clientelism

Pellicer

Wegner

Benstead

2021

Journal of Theoretical Politics

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Why do some poor people engage in clientelism whereas others do not? Why does clientelism sometimes take traditional forms and sometimes more instrumental forms? We propose a formal model of clientelism that addresses these questions focusing primarily on the citizen’s perspective. Citizens choose between supporting broad-based redistribution or engaging in clientelism. Introducing insights from social psychology, we study the interactions between citizen beliefs and values, and their political choices. Clientelism, political inefficacy, and inequality legitimation beliefs reinforce each other leading to multiple equilibria. One of these resembles traditional clientelism, with disempowered clients that legitimize social inequalities. Community connectivity breaks this reinforcement mechanism and leads to another equilibrium where clientelism takes a modern, instrumental, form. The model delivers insights on the role of citizen beliefs for their bargaining power as well as for the persistence and transformation of clientelism. We illustrate the key mechanisms with ethnographic literature on the topic.

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“…All bribed voters who oppose the buyer’s candidate have incentives to free-ride on others’ compliance while voting for their preferred choices. A major difference with previous models that use repeated interactions to sustain vote buying, like the ones in Stokes (2005) and Gallego (2012), is that this paper’s model allows us to explore in detail the bribed voters’ collective action problem.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Buying votes with imperfect local knowledge and a secret ballot

Rueda

2014

Journal of Theoretical Politics

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How do politicians buy votes in secret ballot elections? I present a model of vote buying in which a broker sustains bribed voters’ compliance by conditioning future bribes on whether her candidate’s votes reach an optimally set threshold. Unlike previous explanations of compliance, the threshold mechanism does not require brokers to observe individual voters’ political preferences or even vote totals of the bribed voters. I show that when there is uncertainty about voters’ preferences, compliance can be sustained as long as electoral results of small groups are available. If preferences are observed however, vote buying is not deterred by higher aggregation of electoral results. I also find that vote buying is facilitated when voters care about the welfare of other voters. Using survey data from Nigeria, I provide evidence consistent with the model’s results.

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Self-enforcing clientelism

Cited by 19 publications

References 18 publications

Clientelism's Red Herrings: Dead Ends and New Directions in the Study of Nonprogrammatic Politics

Clientelism's Red Herrings: Dead Ends and New Directions in the Study of Nonprogrammatic Politics

Poor people’s beliefs and the dynamics of clientelism

Buying votes with imperfect local knowledge and a secret ballot

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