El concepto de clientelismo

C H A P T E R 2 5

POLITICA L CLIENTELIS M

S U S A N C . STOKE S

IF most scholars of the topic are right, political clientelism slows economic development, vitiates democracy, and allows dictators to hold onto power longer than they otherwise would. It slows economic development by discouraging govern­ ments from providing public goods and by creating an interest in the ongoing poverty and dependency of constituents. Its vitiates democracy by undermining the equality of the ballot, allowing some voters to use their votes to communicate policy preferences while others use their votes only as an exchange for minor side payments. And it keeps dictators in power by allowing them to stage elections in which competition is stifled in which voters who would prefer to vote against the regime are kept from doing so by fear of retaliation. Given these critical effects, we need to understand clientelism's internal dynamics, its causes, and its consequences.

1 DEFINITION S

1.1 Clientelism

The concept of clientelism suffers more than most from a lack of consensus about its meaning. Focusing on clientelism as a method of electoral mobilization, I define

the proffering of material goods in return for electoral support, where the criterion of distribution that the patron uses is simply: did you (will you) support me?1

It is worth noting that "proffering of material goods" in reality sometimes takes the form of threats rather than inducements. We have the government of Singapore threatening to withhold improvements of housing in districts that elect opposition legislators (Tarn 2005), Christian Democratic operatives in Naples and Palermo threatening to cite opposition-supporting grocers for health violations (Chubb 1982), and the local magnate threatening to fire citizens who vote against his favored candidates in Misiones, Argentina (Urquiza 2006), to cite just a few examples.

It is the distributive criterion of electoral support that distinguishes clientelism from other materially oriented political strategies. Consider, by contrast, what is known in the USA as pork barrel politics, in which benefits are paid to one or a few districts while costs are shared across all districts (Aldrich 1995,30).2 The implicit criterion for the distribu­ tion of pork is: do you live in my district? Or consider programmatic redistributive politics, in which parties in government emit public policies that withdraw resources from some groups and distribute them to others, almost always with electoral considerations in mind. The criterion for who will benefit from redistributive programs is: do you occupy a given class of beneficiaries (those who are unemployed, or have retired, or fall into a given tax bracket, etc.)?3 Programmatic benefits therefore have a public good quality: they redistribute resources from classes of non-beneficiaries to classes of beneficiaries, but within a class of beneficiaries, particular people who qualify cannot be excluded. By contrast there is a quid pro quo aspect to clientelist redistribution: it is only available on condition that the client complies by providing political support.

My definition is not worlds apart from Kitschelt and Wilkinson's, who note that citizen-politician linkages are often "based on direct material inducements targeted to individuals and small groups of citizens whom politicians know to be highly responsive to such side-payments and willing to surrender their vote for the right price." This they call a "patronage-based, voter-party linkage" (2007, 10). But alternative (or at least different) definitions abound. One defines "patron-client relationships" more generically as a "vertical dyadic alliance... between two persons of unequal status, power or resources each of whom finds it useful to have as an ally someone superior or inferior to himself (Lande 1977, p. xx). The "dyadic" part of the definition underscores the face-to-face quality of clientelism; the "alliance" part emphasizes the repeated character of the relationship.

Other students of clientelism define it narrowly as an exchange of a public sector job for political support (see e.g. Robinson and Verdier 2003, 2)—what many call

1 A different phenomenon, which would be labeled campaign finance or corruption (depending on a country's laws), is when private actors give money to politicians and parties in exchange for legislative concessions and other favors. In this relation, the flow of money is the reverse of the flow in clientelism: it goes not from politician to private actor but from private actor to politician.

2 Safire notes that the phase "probably is derived from the pre-Civil War practice of periodically distributing salt pork to the slaves from huge barrels" (1993).

3 These distinctions are conceptual, not empirical: a politician who deploys clientelist strategies may simultaneously provide public and programmatic-redistributive goods (see Magaloni, Diaz-Cayeros, and Esterez 2006).

6o6 S U S A N C . S T O K E S

patronage. Still others define it in terms of what it is that patrons and clients exchange. According to James Scott, the relation is an "instrumental friendship in which an individual of higher socioeconomic status (patron) uses his own influence and resources to provide protection or benefits, or both, for a person of lower status (client) who, for his part, reciprocates by offering general support and assistance, including personal services, to the patron" (1972, 92, emphasis mine). Whitaker makes a similar point in his discussion of politics in emirates, writing that in clientelist relations, "patronage, economic security, and protection can be exchanged for personal loyalty and obedience" (cited in Lemarchand 1977,102).

Scott's definition raises the question: under what conditions would a client not simply purchase protections and benefits in the market, rather than eliciting them from someone whom he knows personally and who is of a higher status than he? Markets may not exist or be well developed for the kinds of protections or benefits sought. Or these protections and benefits may be available on the market but their potential consumer (the client) has insufficiently plentiful resources (income) to secure them from an impersonal seller. The low-income, limited-assets client has other resources in greater abundance: time, a vote, insertion into networks of other potential supporters whom he can influence, and the like. We do not have to get very far into definitions of clientelism before we are reminded of the material poverty of the client.

Scott's definition also focuses our attention on the clients' interest in securing security and protection. In many polities security and protection are provided by the state as a public good. Hence, taking Scott's two points together, all else equal we would expect patron-client ties to be prevalent in societies with widespread poverty and with a relatively weak and ineffective state apparatus.

1.2 Vote Buying and Patronage

Having explored definitions of clientelism (and offered my own), I now do the same for the related concepts of patronage and vote buying. In my usage, patronage and vote buying are subclasses of clientelism. Whereas clientelism involves the dyad's inferior member giving electoral support broadly construed, including her own vote and efforts to secure for the patron the votes of others, vote buying is a more narrow exchange of goods (benefits, protections) for one's own vote. In contrast, again, to pork and programmatic redistribution, the criterion for selecting vote sellers is: did you (will you) vote for me?

Patronage, in turn, is the proffering of public resources (most typically, public employment) by office holders in return for electoral support, where the criterion of distribution is again the clientelist one: did you—will you—vote for me? Hence patronage is distinct from the broader category of clientelism. In clientelism, the more powerful political actor may or may not hold public office, and therefore may or may not be able to credibly promise to secure public resources (as opposed to, say, party resources) for the client. In patronage, the patron holds public office and distributes state resources. This definition concurs with those of others, such as

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Mainwaring, who defines patronage as "the use or distribution of state resources on a nonmeritocratic

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