The Oxford Handbook of Political Science (Oxford Handbooks of Political Science) by Robert E. Goodin

Author:Robert E. Goodin
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-06-17T18:30:00+00:00

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 Mainwaring, who defines patronage as “the use or distribution of state resources on a nonmeritocratic basis for political gain” (1999, 177). The clientelism–patronage distinction corresponds to Medina and Stokes’s (2007) one between economic monopoly over goods which the patron controls independent of the outcome of an election, and political monopoly over goods that he controls only if he retains office. An example of an economic monopoly is a grain elevator in a rural community, access to which its owner can limit to those who voted or will vote for him, whether or not he wins the election. An example of a political monopoly is public employment, which a patron can use to reward or punish voters only in the case that he wins.

Whether a relationship is of more general clientelism or of patronage—whether it is based on an economic or a political monopoly—is consequential. Under a political monopoly, voters who wish to throw a patron out of office may face a collective action problem: his exit represents a public good, yet the voter who votes against him when a majority of others does not risks suffering the patron’s retaliation. Each voter minimizes her risk and maximizes her payoff when she votes for the unpopular patron but all other voters (or at least a majority) vote against him. Yet because all voters face this same incentive, the unpopular patron remains in power.

An implication is that, in polities in which patronage or political monopoly is widespread, one cannot infer a party’s (or its program’s) popularity from its electoral successes. Mexico’s PRI offers an example of a ruling party that remained in power and continued to win elections, probably long after its underlying popularity had been severely eroded (see Magaloni 2006).

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