Clientelism and Vote-Maximizing in Indigenous Latin America

The analysis presented in this chapter indicates that indigenous voters are disproportionately targeted as clients in vote-buying schemes, which is why the distribution of patronage has become a necessary vote-maximizing strategy for ethnic-party candidates to utilize to earn votes. This finding gives further credence to the argument that ethnic-party candidates must compete using the tactics employed by mainstream candidates to win votes. As such, it was unfair to expect that ethnic-party candidates could ever be more consistently policy-focused, given the expectations of patronage that indigenous constituents have during campaign season. To demonstrate the power of clientelism as a technique to attract indigenous supporters, this chapter analyzes AmericasBarometer survey data from fifteen countries across Latin America. The results show that not only are indigenous voters more likely to be targeted for clientelism, but ethnic-party supporters specifically are also more likely to be approached to sell their votes. These findings therefore provide evidence of the generalizability of the argument that ethnic-party candidates face strong incentives to engage in the clientelist behavior of mainstream parties in order to win votes across Latin America.

Candidate Matters for Mainstream-Party Campaigns in Ecuador

This chapter evaluates the campaign strategies used by four different traditional-party candidates in the Andean and Amazonian regions during Ecuador’s 2006 elections. The analysis focuses on the extent to which traditional-party candidates cultivate a personal vote versus a vote for their party’s label. Like the Pachakutik candidates, traditional-party nominees are highly influenced by their own personal experiences in politics, as well as district-level factors such as the incidence of poverty. However, the profiles of these four candidates illustrate the variety of techniques that can be adopted by those who campaign on non-ethnic-party labels. Together, these traditional-party candidates provide a baseline for making comparisons between candidates associated with an ethnic-party label and candidates who are not. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the similarities and differences between the Pachakutik candidates profiled in chapter 4 and the traditional candidates profiled here.

The Evolution of Ethnic-Party Behavior

Ethnic parties are not unitary actors, and this chapter shows that their behavior is constrained by the campaign strategies that their individual candidates adopt. By analyzing election results for over five thousand candidates and forty-five parties that have competed in four legislative elections in Ecuador—in 1998, 2002, 2006, and 2009—this chapter evaluates how ethnic parties and their candidates connect with their constituencies. Candidates affiliated with ethnic parties receive greater programmatic support, but only in earlier elections. This change is largely attributable to the behavior of individual ethnic-party candidates, and reflects the evolution of ethnic-party behavior in Ecuador. Building on the theory developed in chapter 2, the text explores why ethnic-party candidates form the linkages with voters that they do. As expected, ethnic-party candidates form more programmatic linkages in districts of higher magnitude, but struggle to form programmatic linkages when they are party leaders and incumbents, suggesting that they are instead connecting with voters on the basis of their personal characteristics.

The Role of Candidates, Districts, and Campaign Strategies in Determining Party Behavior

This chapter develops a framework of party behavior that focuses on how district-level legislative campaigns influence the behavior of national parties. In a departure from much of the literature, the text argues that parties’ electoral behavior is significantly determined by candidates who are constrained by their personal characteristics and the demographics of their districts when shaping their campaign strategies. Using ethnic parties as an exemplar of niche, policy-seeking parties, the chapter contends that some campaign strategies are inherently conflictual with niche-party goals, resulting in party behavior that does not always reflect the niche focus of the party. Certain candidate characteristics—such as experience with party leadership and access to resources—combined with district characteristics—such as the level of partisan support—generate conditions under which candidates benefit from campaigning on the basis of their personal characteristics and clientelism, rather than their party platform. The result is that, in the aggregate, the ethnic party ultimately sacrifices its niche policy-making goals for the sake of campaign strategies that make legislative candidates more electorally viable in their districts.

The Implications of Individual Campaigns, Elections, and Clientelism for Ethnic-Party Behavior

This chapter discusses some of the implications of the findings of the previous chapters, not only for the Pachakutik party and the indigenous movement, but for all niche parties competing in developing democracies. While ethnic parties certainly provide opportunities for increased indigenous representation, their involvement in the political arena has produced some troubling results. In particular, the chapter focuses on the fragmentation of Pachakutik, the apparent decline in support among the indigenous population, and the reliance on patronage within campaigns as indications of ethnic-party struggles. The chapter also argues that the anticipated positive effects of ethnic parties may be tempered by the barriers they face to achieving their goals of substantive representation within the formal political arena. In the process, the analysis shows how these findings fill a gap in the literatures on ethnic politics, institutions, and party evolution.

The Importance of Candidate and District Characteristics

This chapter examines how ethnic-party candidates’ efforts to attract votes in 2006 were reflected in their campaign strategies. According to the argument of this book, ethnic-party candidates are expected to behave strategically in response to certain individual and district-level constraints, and on occasion emphasize their personal characteristics and their abilities to provide patronage in order to be competitive. This chapter evaluates this expectation using data gathered in three provinces on five different Pachakutik party campaigns during the 2006 legislative elections in Ecuador. The investigation focuses specifically on how district demographics (like district magnitude) and candidate qualities (like prior experience in politics and access to resources) affect the extent to which ethnic candidates emphasize a consistent platform for attracting voters. This qualitative analysis relies on campaign materials, campaign speeches, candidate interviews, and personal observations in order to measure how candidates generate representational relationships with their constituents.

Ethnic Parties and Their Candidates Matter

This chapter argues that ethnic parties are a type of niche party, while highlighting the political relevance of ethnic parties and providing data on ethnic parties that compete in legislative elections around the world (in Asia, Canada and Western Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa). The chapter then explains how the extant literature on ethnic parties is limited because it ignores the behavior of individual candidates campaigning in their districts. A review of the literature on party behavior shows how individual campaign strategies connect with those goals. The chapter concludes by discussing the innovative methodologies this book uses to demonstrate how individual candidates matter in elections; the text also provides an overview of how the rest of the book advances the view that niche parties are similar to other parties in their behavior, largely because they are constrained by the strategies that individual candidates adopt.