Economic Coercion

Chapter 6 turns to the analysis of clientelistic strategies premised on economic coercion. In urban settings, the main brokers involved in coercive strategies are employers who threaten employees with a reduction in their wages or with economic layoffs. In rural settings, the main economic brokers are moneylenders, who threaten voters with the worsening of their ongoing economic exchanges. The chapter documents the existence of these coercive strategies using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses. The variation across localities in the incidence of such strategies is likely to be affected by economic conditions that increase the capacity of brokers to withstand efforts of some candidates to reduce their economic influence.

Context and Research Design

This study examines clientelistic politics in two post-communist countries, Hungary and Romania. Chapter 3 presents descriptive information on the recent evolution of party systems in both countries and the changes in patterns of political competition in recent elections. It examines the most significant policies that provide opportunities for clientelistic manipulation of state resources. In both countries, the main social policy programs that can be subjected to political manipulation are workfare programs. The chapter discusses the main political considerations leading to the adoption of workfare programs characterized by high discretion of mayors over the allocation of policy benefits. It also describes how a mixed methods research design was crafted to study behavior that candidates, brokers, and voters often prefer to hide.

Introduction

Chapter 1 motivates the theoretical contribution of the book, situates it within the existing literature, and provides an executive summary of the remaining part of the book. It begins by presenting four examples of clientelistic strategies commonly encountered during elections. These examples illustrate the existence of significant variation among the brokers mediating between candidates and voters and among the strategies used by these brokers to incentivize voters. While existing studies do not differentiate among different forms of electoral clientelism, but only contrast clientelistic and programmatic targeting, this volume highlights how different forms of electoral clientelism carry different information about politicians’ programmatic priorities. The main object of this book is to characterize the variation among clientelistic strategies and to examine how voters evaluate candidates that pursue different illicit strategies.

Conclusion

Chapter 8 restates the results of the book and discusses the implications of its findings for ongoing scholarly and policy debate concerning the persistence of electoral clientelism in current democracies. First, the chapter shows that the authors’ account of electoral clientelism presents new micro-foundations for the understanding of the development of political parties in countries with weakly institutionalized party organizations. Parties, it is argued, are loose aggregations of a variety of brokers that are loosely coordinated by party leaders. The book provides tools for understanding the variation across localities in the identities and strategies of these brokers, and can explain variation in the informal organizational structure of different parties. This chapter also discusses the implications of the authors’ findings for the adoption of electoral reforms that aim to reduce the incidence of electoral clientelism. Their study identifies two reasons why such reforms may lead only to modest reductions in the incidence of electoral clientelism. First, because not all voters seem to view candidates who use clientelism negatively, simply increasing transparency to provide voters with information about which candidates are using clientelism may not actually create incentives to reduce it. Second, electoral reforms may be less successful in closing the opportunities for substitution among different clientelistic strategies. The imposition of higher punishments for particular electoral strategies may create opportunities for candidates to strategically switch to forms of clientelism that are punished less severely. The analysis of electoral clientelism advanced in this book provides policymakers with a better analytic framework to consider possible opportunities for substitution among various clientelistic practices that offset the potential for reforms.

Policy Coercion

Chapter 5 explores the use of non-programmatic strategies premised on welfare coercion. Drawing on ethnographic research, it documents the use of different coercive practices used by candidates in the region. “Blackmail” involves the initial toleration of some irregularities (such as non-payment of taxes), which are exploited at elections. Welfare coercion, by contrast, involves threats to cut off access to long-term benefits. The chapter argues that the use of coercion is a politically attractive strategy in localities where eligibility to welfare benefits is particularly politicized. In such localities, the use of clientelistic strategies premised on welfare favors is likely to be electorally costly. By contrast, the use of coercion allows mayors to maximize electoral support from beneficiaries of social policies, while at the same time signaling a policy position of toughness on welfare to opponents of the social policy programs. Using listexperiments, the chapter documents the use of coercive strategies and shows that the incidence of such strategies is higher in localities where a larger share of voters cannot meet the eligibility criteria for social policy benefits. It also examines how voters evaluate candidates that use coercive clientelistic strategies as opposed to strategies premised on favors and find that the use of coercion is usually viewed more harshly.

Vote Buying

Vote buying, the offer of particularistic rewards to voters in exchange for electoral support at the ballot box, is the form of clientelism that has been analyzed most extensively in previous studies. Chapter 7 documents the presence of this clientelistic strategy in East European elections. It documents important differences between vote buying and clientelistic strategies that politicize state resources relating to the types of brokers used in these exchanges, the goods offered to voters, and the identity of the voters targeted by these strategies. It is shown that the use of this strategy creates opportunities for candidates to send voters signals about their personal attributes and policy position, which lower the political audience costs incurred by candidates who use this strategy.

Policy Favors

Chapter 4 examines clientelistic strategies where political brokers deploy state resources—privileged access to policy resources or administrative favors—as positive promises of future access to incentivize electoral choices of voters. Drawing on ethnographic research, it examines the strategies by which these brokers (mayors or employees in the local administration) seek to establish norms of political reciprocity to voters, the activation of these norms of reciprocity during elections, and the strategies used by brokers to ensure that voters comply with their political promises and vote for the correct candidate. Using list experiments, the chapter documents the use of these strategies during recent elections and examines the variation across localities in the use of such strategies. Finally, the informational opportunities and constraints associated with the use of this clientelistic strategy are examined. Using survey-based experiments, the chapter shows that the use of clientelistic strategies premised on favors has the least negative impact on perceptions of candidates with voters who are happy with the existing distribution of social policy resources.

Disaggregating Clientelism

Chapter 2 presents the theoretical framework of the analysis. Definitional and conceptual issues related to the study of electoral clientelism are clarified, and a classification of clientelistic strategies that differentiates among strategies based on public versus private resources, and those structured as positive promises versus negative threats, is proposed. A theory is built that begins by conceptualizing the way that voters who are directly and indirectly exposed to different forms of clientelism perceive and react to it. Drawing on normative theories, it is conjectured that voters are likely to judge coercive strategies more severely than strategies premised on positive inducements. While candidates incur political audience costs from using various clientelistic strategies, they may attempt to reduce the severity of this constraint by sending voters signals about their personal attributes and their policy positions. The chapter develops theoretical expectations about the informational signals that may result from the use of different non-programmatic strategies for voters with certain policy preferences or characteristics. Finally, the chapter conceptualizes how these audience costs and resource constraints shape the choices that politicians make about the level and form of clientelism that they use. The normative reactions of voters and their likelihood of complying with the clientelistic exchanges shape the potential effectiveness of different strategies. It is also predicted that politicians’ abilities to employ different forms of clientelism are shaped by access to resources, including, most importantly, control of local flows of social policy through city halls.