Hicken’s four elements

A relationship is clientelist when all four hold:

1. Dyadic — a two-sided relationship between specific people
2. Contingent — you get it only if you deliver political support, and lose it if you stop
3. Hierarchical — the side handing out the benefit holds much more power
4. Iterated — it repeats; both sides expect a next time

Programmatic politics

A benefit promised to an entire category of citizens, written into a rule.

• Who receives: anyone who qualifies — here, everyone over 65
• What is exchanged: a policy, not a thing
• The test: you get it whether or not you voted for them

Patronage

A public job given to a party worker as payment for service to the party.

• Who receives: party insiders, not voters at large
• What is exchanged: the post itself — Diego paid in work he did for the party
• The test: the currency is public office employment, and the recipient worked for the party

▶ Mexico — worked

1. What is handed over, and what is asked in return?
   Groceries and buckets now, for a vote. The solar heaters go only to those who complied — conditional, and it comes back next time.
2. How did anyone know whom to fire?
   They asked them to their faces and people answered out loud. Nobody read a ballot. Hold on to that.
3. What is the party worker’s job, and what if he fails?
   He is the middleman: he hands out the goods and reports back. His own public job is the hostage.
4. A third of voters, or 16.7% — why do they differ?
   Different years, populations and instruments. The NGO counted incidents citizens reported; the survey asked a sample. Both are floors.

Vote buying

A material payment tied to how you vote in a particular election.

• Who receives: ordinary voters, targeted one at a time
• What is exchanged: cash, food or goods, once, close to the election
• The test: the debt is settled at the ballot box — nothing is carried forward

▶ Kyrgyzstan — worked

1. What does the photograph prove?
   That you voted the way you were paid to. It turns a promise nobody can check into evidence.
2. Why is photographing your ballot against the rules?
   Because the secret ballot exists to make exactly that proof impossible. The phone defeats the institution.
3. What could a party do instead, needing no proof?
   Hold that one open — you will work it out yourselves in the broker exercise.

Turnout buying

A benefit conditional on showing up, not on how you vote.

• Who receives: the party’s own supporters — the ones who might stay home
• What is exchanged: a ride, a favour, a small payment
• The test: nobody asks which box you ticked, only that you went

Five terms, one example each

The running case: Mexico’s PRI

• Founded 1929; held the presidency without interruption until 2000
• Organised society into sectors: labour (CTM), peasants (CNC), popular (CNOP)
• Benefits — land, jobs, credit, relief — flowed through these bodies
• Membership and loyalty were the price of access
• In 2000 the PRI candidate took 36.1%, and lost the presidency

So what?

• We can now say what clientelism is: particularistic and contingent.
• But “contingent” is a promise about something the party cannot see.
• Secret ballots were invented to make vote choice invisible.
• So the definition contains a puzzle it cannot solve alone.

What the secret ballot changed

▶ Brazil — worked

1. What does the voter answer?
   “I accepted the favor, and then I voted for whoever I wanted.” He took it and defected — the puzzle on the next slide.
2. Why might goods work better than money?
   They arrive at the house, are worth most to whoever is short, and the clip says candidates offer what is scarce there: water, building material.
3. Which of our five terms is this?
   Vote buying. One payment, one election, no next time — “they have already paid for your vote” says the debt is settled. Clientelism would come back.
4. Whom do they approach, and why is it harder to refuse in hard times?
   People in need. “Since the person is in need, they take it” — hardship makes refusing costlier.

How the threat is sustained

Stokes models machine and voter as a repeated game with imperfect monitoring.

• It cannot read your ballot, but it reads your street.
• Brokers live where you live: they see rallies, gossip, signals.
• From those signals the machine forms a guess about your vote.
• A guess is enough: it only needs to be right often.
• What disciplines you is losing the flow, not one parcel.
• The exchange is enforced by the future, not the transaction.

Predictions, and what Argentina showed

So what?

• Stokes solves the puzzle by making monitoring imperfect but real.
• Yet in most places brokers cannot actually observe the ballot.
• And question 3 pointed somewhere else entirely.
• Turnout is often recorded and verifiable. Vote choice is not.

Nichter: buy turnout, not votes

The party stops trying to change minds and pays its own supporters to show up.

• They were always going to vote for it. They just might not have gone.
• So nobody needs to see the ballot — only the record of who turned out.
• In many places that record is public, and the broker can simply look.
• The secret ballot stops being an obstacle, because nothing secret is being checked.
• Nichter re-read Stokes’s Argentine data: the rewards went to the party’s own loyalists, not to waverers.

Finan & Schechter: reciprocity

Rural Paraguay: a household survey after the 2006 municipal elections, plus a survey of the brokers themselves.

• 26% of households said a party offered them money, food, or goods.
• Reciprocity was measured years earlier, in an anonymous trust game.
• Anonymous play is a disposition, not a favour to anyone.
• A one-standard-deviation rise in reciprocity raised targeting by 44%.
• Targeted villagers were not closer to the broker in the network.

But can brokers actually find them?

One parcel, three mechanisms

Why should taking a parcel change what the voter does?

Conclusion

We opened with three questions about that picture.

• Why flour and oil, not cash? The benefit has to reach a named household and be withheld from everyone else. That is what particularistic and contingent mean.
• What is the clipboard for? It is the machine’s answer to the secret ballot — a record of who got what, so compliance can be guessed at and withdrawn.
• Why ask the household to turn up? Because turnout can be checked and the vote cannot.