Clientelism and development: Vote-buying meets patronage
| Published date | 01 January 2022 |
| Date | 01 January 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/09516298211061515 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Clientelism and development:
Vote-buying meets patronage
Vladimir Shchukin
HSE University, Russian Federation; CERGE-EI, Czech Republic
Cemal Eren Arbatli
HSE University, Faculty of Economics Sciences, Russian Federation
Abstract
Offering employment in the public sector in exchange for electoral support (patronage politics)
and vote-buying are clientelistic practices frequently used by political machines. In the literature,
these practices are typically studied in isolation. In this paper, we study how the interaction
between these two practices (as opposed to having just one tool) affects economic development.
We present a theoretical model of political competition, where, before the election, the incum-
bent chooses the level of state investment that can improve productivity in the private sector.
This decision affects the income levels of employees in the private sector, and, thereby, the
costs and effectiveness of vote-buying and patronage. We show that when the politician can
use both clientelistic instruments simultaneously, his opportunity cost for clientelism in terms
of foregone future taxes declines. As a result, the equilibrium amount of public investment is typi-
cally lower when both tools are available than otherwise.
Keywords
Political clientelism, vote-buying, patronage, economic development
1. Introduction
Political clientelism has received lots of scholarly attention over the past three decades.
There is an extensive literature about non-programmatic distributive practices such as
Corresponding author:
Vladimir Shchukin, Faculty of Economic Sciences, HSE University, Moscow, Russian Federation and CERGE-EI,
a joint workplace of Charles University and the Economics Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences,
Politickych veznu 7, 11121 Prague, Czech Republic.
Email: vschukin@hse.ru
Article
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2022, Vol. 34(1) 3–34
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/09516298211061515
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vote-buying and patronage that politicians use to try to win and retain office.
1
Clientelistic
practices have been a subject of interest in seminal theoretical contributions to redistribu-
tive politics (Dixit and Londregan, 1996; Gallego, 2015; Lindbeck and Weibull, 1987;
Persson and Tabellini, 2000; Rosas et al., 2014) as well as many empirical studies
(Frye et al., 2014; Holland and Palmer-Rubin, 2015; Mares and Zhu, 2015). Yet most
of the theoretical work study different clientelistic strategies in isolation (Dekel et al.,
2008; Robinson et al., 2014; Robinson et al., 2017; Robinson and Verdier, 2013;
Stokes et al., 2013). In practice however, politicians and political parties generally
combine several non-programmatic methods. For instance, Bratton (2008) demonstrates
the co-existence of vote-buying and threats of violence in the Nigerian elections. Recent
work on the use of economic intimidation in the elections in Eastern Europe (e.g. Frye
et al., 2019; Mares et al., 2018) show that politicians use a portfolio of clientelistic stra-
tegies, including vote-buying and economic threats in the workplace. Why do political
machines use several instruments simultaneously? One immediate answer is that different
instruments are needed to effectively target different sub-groups of the electorate.
Gans-Morse et al. (2014) for example have argued that politicians prefer to use a mix
of strategies, including turnout-buying of supporters and vote-buying and abstention-
buying of citizens who are closer to opposition candidates because they care about net
votes. However, to better understand how patrons choose among the menu of clientelistic
tools at their disposal, one may need to move beyond the effect of each instrument in iso-
lation and think about how one instrument complements or undermines the other when
used together. Mares and Young (2018) have argued that politicians use both positive
and negative inducements because they complement each other. For example, loss-averse
voters are more likely to vote for the patron when political brokers first offer them privi-
leged access to some goods or services, like cheap credit, state transfers, and then threaten
to take these away if turnout and electoral support are not high enough. Rosas et al. (2014)
lay out a theory of clientelism where incumbent politicians use programmatic politics
(public good provision) and turnout-buying conjointly because they complement each
other. The first policy helps the incumbent increase his popularity, and the second
policy raises the probability that people will go to the polls.
This paper offers an alternative reason why political machines can resort to several
non-programmatic methods simultaneously and show how the multiplicity of clientelistic
tools can have a detrimental effect on private sector productivity. Our departure point is
that clientelism not only diverts existing resources away from more productive uses but
can also generate perverse incentives such as underinvestment in public goods that
benefit large segments of the society without generating much political rent to politicians.
We present a model, where an incumbent politician can both allocate public sector jobs as
a patronage tool and hire a political broker to buy votes for him. Before the election takes
place, the incumbent politician first decides on the level of public investment (e.g. in
infrastructure) that increases productivity in the private sector. This raises tax revenues,
a source of economic rent for the incumbent if he is reelected. The incumbent values
income in the private sector only for the tax revenues it generates. This is because
voters cannot commit to rewarding the incumbent for high levels of public investment
since the latter is decided before the election in an irreversible way and leads to higher
income for workers in the private sector regardless of the electoral outcome. After the
4Journal of Theoretical Politics 34(1)
public investment is made, both the incumbent and the opposition announce income tax
rates on private sector incomes. Unlike the opposition, the incumbent has two additional
tools he can use before the election. The first is patronage employment, a wage offer for
public sector employees in exchange for their loyalty (electoral support). The second
option is to buy the votes of private-sector workers using a broker.
Our model builds upon Robinson and Verdier (2013), where patronage motive is
present but vote-buying is not an option. Robinson and Verdier (2013) consider a
model, where the incumbent sets the level of productivity-enhancing public investment
and faces a tradeoff between the higher amount of collected votes and lower future tax
revenues. They show that the incumbent politician underinvests vis-à-vis the socially
optimal level because lowering investment renders patronage more effective. A lower
level of investment means lower incomes in the private sector, thereby making jobs in
the public sector relatively more attractive. In our model, there are two additional mechan-
isms through which lowering investment raises the electoral support for the incumbent.
First, lower incomes in the private sector mean more votes bought for a given transfer
per client. This increases the incumbent’s winning probability. Second, the higher the
chances of electoral victory for the incumbent become, the more effort the broker
exerts to allure clients. This is because his rewards —unlike his costs—are conditional
on the reelection of his patron. The downside is that the lower incomes in the private sector
lead to lower tax revenues. Hence, the potential rents to reelection decrease. Therefore, the
incumbent faces a tradeoff between the number of votes collected and the level of future
tax revenues. But since both patronage and vote-buying incentives work to reduce invest-
ment, having both tools at one’s disposal, rather than just one of them, reduces the oppor-
tunity cost of clientelism (due to lost taxation rent) per vote.
To see why, first consider the case where patronage, via public sector employment, is
the only available tool of clientelism. In the model, patronage employment in public
sector is socially inefficient. Yet it generates private rents for employees as well as the
politician who gets to win the election. A reduction in investment (i.e. incomes) in the
private sector attracts more people into the public sector for a given patronage wage.
This leads to a narrowing of the tax base. Suppose that, for each dollar of reduction in
investment (in the private sector), tax revenues decrease by xdollars, while votes col-
lected by patronage increase by qvotes. Then, the opportunity cost of patronage per
vote is x
qdollars. Now, suppose that vote-buying is the only option and there is no patron-
age (i.e. no public sector employment). Say that a one-dollar reduction in investment
leads to a fall in tax revenues by ydollars but increases the number of votes bought
by wvotes. Thus, the opportunity cost of vote-buying is y
wdollars per vote. Note that y>
xbecause, without patronage, more people are employed in the private sector, and so the
tax base is larger. Finally, suppose that both patronage and vote-buying are used together.
Then the patron could buy w+qvotes with a one-dollar reduction in investment, while
the tax revenue foregone would only be xdollars (for the same initial size of the private
sector). Therefore, the opportunity cost will be x
w+qdollars per vote, which is less than the
opportunity costs of patronage and vote-buying in isolation, that is, x
qand y
w, respectively.
Since clientelism becomes cheaper (in terms of lost tax revenues) for the incumbent poli-
tician, we get more clientelism and lower investment (hence lower productivity) in the
private sector.
Shchukin and Arbatli 5
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