Clientelism and development: Vote-buying meets patronage

Offering employment in the public sector in exchange for electoral support (patronage politics) and vote-buying are clientelistic practices frequently used by political machines. In the literature, these practices are typically studied in isolation. In this paper, we study how the interaction between these two practices (as opposed to having just one tool) affects economic development. We present a theoretical model of political competition, where, before the election, the incumbent chooses the level of state investment that can improve productivity in the private sector. This decision affects the income levels of employees in the private sector, and, thereby, the costs and effectiveness of vote-buying and patronage. We show that when the politician can use both clientelistic instruments simultaneously, his opportunity cost for clientelism in terms of foregone future taxes declines. As a result, the equilibrium amount of public investment is typically lower when both tools are available than otherwise.

Political machines and the curse of public resources in subnational democracies

PurposeThis paper argues that decentralization reforms in Colombia, implemented since the 1980s, have led to the decentralization of political clientelism rather than its demise. Clientelism is a system of political and economic institutions that turns every local democracy into an extractive political institution. The authors theoretically demonstrate that an increase in public resources will increase corruption.Design/methodology/approachThe authors develop and test a subnational public choice model, where clientelism in elections and corruption in public administration constitute a stable long-term institutional equilibrium. The model comprises two linked subgames: electoral tournament and corruption in public policy. The model makes two predictions that currently oppose predominant approaches: (1) increasing the severity of jail sentences to electoral crimes increases their price and the predominance of machine politics, instead of improving the quality of electoral tournaments and (2) increasing local governments' public finance increases clientelism in elections and corruption in public administration.FindingsThe authors find evidence in favor of the theoretical model of curse of public resources, using difference-in-differences estimation with a database 2016–17 of Colombia's 1,034 municipalities. This country is well-suited for our analysis because it has a long-term commitment to formal democratic processes (since 1958), while plagued by endemic corruption and clientelism problems.Originality/value(1) The theoretical approach is innovative and disruptive of current models on the problem, (2) the model builds upon the Colombian situation, a country with prominent corruption and political violence problems regardless of its relatively long-term commitment with free elections (since 1958) and (3) the theoretical discussion is tested using a comprehensive set of difference-in-differences estimations.

Accountable to whom? How strong parties subvert local democratic institutions

How do politicians in emerging democracies subvert institutional reforms that are designed to improve accountability? Looking at patron-client relations within political parties, I present a strategy, partisan accountability, by which strong parties undermine accountability to citizens. At the national level, parties build patronage networks. Central party organizations use their power and resources to build political machines that extend to the local level. Leveraging these patronage networks, national politicians co-opt local politicians into being accountable to central party interests over their own constituents. I employ original subnational data from Bosnia and Herzegovina on party organization and mayoral recalls from 2005 to 2015. The analysis shows that strong parties initiate recalls to install loyal, co-partisan mayors rather than to sanction mayors for poor policy performance. This pattern demonstrates a strategy by which central party organizations in competitive democracies stifle subnational democratization to consolidate power.

Political machines: a framework for studying politics in social machines

In the age of ubiquitous computing and artificially intelligent applications, social machines serves as a powerful framework for understanding and interpreting interactions in socio-algorithmic ecosystems. Although researchers have largely used it to analyze the interactions of individuals and algorithms, limited attempts have been made to investigate the politics in social machines. In this study, I claim that social machines are per se political machines, and introduce a five-point framework for classifying influence processes in socio-algorithmic ecosystems. By drawing from scholars from political theory, I use a notion of influence that functions as a meta-concept for connecting and comparing different conceptions of politics. In this way, I can associate multiple political aspects of social machines from a cybernetic perspective. I show that the framework efficiently categorizes dimensions of influence that shape interactions between individuals and algorithms. These categories are symbolic influence, political conduct, algorithmic influence, design, and regulatory influence. Using case studies, I describe how they interact with each other on online social networks and in algorithmic decision-making systems and illustrate how the framework is able to guide scientists in further research.

Teacher Unions, Political Machines, and the Thorny Politics of Education Reform in Latin America

Existing research on developing countries emphasizes the decisive power of teacher unions in education politics. Yet that power varies, and a full understanding of the roots of union power and the sources of cross-national variation requires deeper analysis of organizational dynamics within unions. This analysis supports four arguments. First, teachers have a range of advantages in overcoming obstacles to collective action. Second, unions are not all alike; they vary widely, from interest groups (in Chile, Brazil, and Peru) to powerful political machines (in Mexico and Ecuador). Third, the source of this variation lies in factors (e.g., influence over teacher hiring) that shift power within unions from members to leaders in political-machine unions. Fourth, analyzing the dimensions of variation helps explain the different outcomes of recent reforms to teacher careers in Latin America, especially in highlighting the staunch opposition from political-machine unions.

Coordinating the machine: subnational political context and the effectiveness of machine politics

Political machines use state resources to win elections in many developing democracies and electoral autocracies. Recent research has noted that the coordination of machine politics can be much more complex and problem-prone than previously thought. Yet, the role that the subnational political context plays in solving these coordination problems has largely been neglected in the comparative literature. This article seeks to fill this gap and suggests that control over the local administration is an important variable that shapes the effectiveness of authoritarian machine politics. We exploit the great institutional and political variation within one of the most prominent electoral authoritarian regimes of today, the Russian Federation, to test the empirical implications of the theory with detailed local level electoral and socio-economic data as well as multilevel regression models. The empirical results highlight the importance of subnational political structures in supporting electoral authoritarian regimes.

Mapping the future of health promotion

The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion was launched in 1986, and ten global conferences later its key calls to action have never been more poignant. To see health as a resource for everyday life in settings where people live, love, work and play, and recognizing equity and the social determinants of health as core to the success of healthy societies remains important. In the nearly 35 years since the Charter was published, we have seen a proliferation of health promotion research with ever greater insights in what drive the health and well-being of populations. Yet, at the same time we also witness a strong tendency to ground health (care) policy in biomedical and clinical evidence alone, and attribute health potential to lifestyle alone, rather than adopting a systems and social perspective of where health is created, grown, and celebrated. The causes for these diverging perspectives are complex, and are grounded in complexity. Humans and their socio-political systems, including the educational and political machines, tend to suffer from what the political scientist Charles Lindblom reputedly identified as the “Big Problem, Small Brain vs Small Problem Big Brain” phenomenon: researchers and intellectual are really good at pouring great volumes of thought and creative power into studying clearly defined issues, whereas politicians and bureaucrats face enormous problems and can get their heads around the multi-faceted solutions that need to be put in place. So - how do we make the complex palatable to the small brain? In this case - how can higher education systems be turned around to truly address the challenges of our and our children's time? The solution partially lies in the deployment of multiple network analyses of key stakeholders and the language they use to construct future realities: unless we have a clear map of the present and a much wider terrain before us to enter we will forever find it hard to navigate in the environmental and conflict dimension.

Conclusion

This closing chapter summarizes the central argument in this book and the evidence supporting it. Beginning with a brief look at the merendero program initiated in 2017 by the Rodríguez-Saá machine in response to an electoral setback, this chapter offers a discussion of the findings of this book and the implications of this study for the consolidation of democracy in Argentina and Mexico. This study’s findings also have implications for the many other uneven emerging democracies around the world that confront the persistence of subnational political machines. Also addressed are the ways in which attention to subnational political processes can further the understanding of a society’s political culture and the forces that shape individuals’ attitudes toward and engagement with their political world. Finally, this chapter brings the reader’s attention to several avenues for future research that this book begins to explore.

Severed Linkages

This chapter focuses on the question of whether individuals living in political machines evaluate their incumbent government in ways that are similar to their counterparts in multiparty systems. Previous chapters established that dominant-party citizens are more likely to be exposed to corruption and vote-buying efforts and tend to be less supportive of basic democratic institutional processes. The expectation is that individuals forced to play the daily game of machine politics will not use common incumbent government performance metrics such as evaluations of the state of the economy, levels of crime and insecurity, and the quality of local health services. Through analysis of self-reported voting intentions, the chapter finds that respondents’ views on these issue areas have little impact on whether or not they will support the incumbent. This severed linkage also appears, to a lesser extent, in the evaluations of national-level politicians made by dominant-party respondents.