A rich ethnographic literature has provided detailed and engrossing depictions of clientelism in a number of settings (Chubb, 1982, Lande, 1983, Auyero, 2000b). This chapter does not set out to replicate such an enterprise. Instead, it makes a distinct contribution to our understanding of clientelism by articulating the behaviors that must be carried out by politicians, and the beliefs that must be held by citizens, for clientelist exchange to be viable. With respect to the former, politicians must establish their identity as personal gatekeepers for benefits and goods funded by the government. In the first part of this chapter, evidence from field work in small towns and cities in Argentina illuminates how politicians facilitate clientelism by claiming credit for, and heightening a sense of scarcity around, the goods and services they distribute. The description of the range of behaviors this entails lays the groundwork for the original measure of clientelism employed later in the book. With respect to the latter, clientelism succeeds when citizens are willing to vote (or engage in other acts of political expression) on an instrumental basis, and further when they believe their political behavior can be monitored by politicians. The second half of this chapter draws on secondary data from a variety of settings to show that these conditions can be, and are frequently, met.

The empirical examples employed here focus on how politicians facilitate clientelism when distributing state-funded social assistance.

In this book, I argue for the importance of bringing the nonpoor into the analysis of political clientelism. While poor voters are most frequently the targets of clientelist exchange, they are not the only voters whose behavior may be affected by these exchanges. The core assumption around which the theory is built is that nonpoor voters dislike clientelism and are willing to withdraw political support from politicians who rely on it. Nonpoor voters might reject clientelism for one of two reasons. First, they might reject the practice out of a moral or normative disdain for the exchange of goods or services for political support. Second, they might reject clientelism out of self-interest. Clientelism does not occur in a vacuum. Most nonpoor voters rely on a variety of government services and administrative capabilities; the time and effort dedicated to making clientelism work may decrease the quality of government service provision more broadly. If either of these two mechanisms hold, nonpoor voters who are not a party to clientelist exchange might withdraw support from a politician who relies on it. In this chapter, I test that claim using original analyses of two separate public opinion surveys in Argentina: a large in-person survey of a representative sample of the Argentine population, and an original telephone survey experiment of somewhat better-off voters. Results from both surveys provide compelling evidence that Argentine citizens who are not poor react negatively to information about clientelism and related practices.

As illustrated in Chapter 2, local incumbents and bureaucrats engage in a range of behaviors that help make clientelism work as a political strategy. The breadth of these practices, and the difficulty of observing them directly, makes the task of developing a measure of clientelism a difficult one. To make measurement tractable, as well as because of its inherent importance, I measure and explain clientelism in the realm of social policy. In this chapter, I review the recent rise of new forms of social policy throughout Latin America and their relationship to clientelism, and I explain why Argentina is a particularly interesting case in this light. Next, I offer details about the social program on which I focus and explain a new and innovative measure of clientelism across municipalities. Finally, I present some initial evidence for the theory developed in Chapter 3.

SOCIAL POLICY AND THE RISE OF SAFETY NETS IN LATIN AMERICA

Any review of the history of the welfare state in Latin America focuses on two salient facts. First, in many countries in the region through the late 1970s, social spending was minimal, making it difficult to speak of a “welfare state” at all. Second, regardless of the size of the welfare state, social spending in Latin America has historically been quite regressive (Lindert et al., 2006).

As detailed in the previous chapter, perhaps the most significant challenge in testing any theory of clientelism lies in measuring it. In spite of clientelism's apparent reach and importance, the difficulty of collecting data on the phenomenon on any large scale means that we actually know very little about how widespread it is. In that chapter, I explained a new measure of clientelism that seeks to faithfully capture how an important government policy is implemented while also allowing for comparison across a substantial number of geographic units. Using an original elite survey of municipal bureaucrats across a large number of cities in Argentina, I assessed personalized mayoral intervention in the implementation of a large food program in that country. The simple cross-tabulations presented in the previous chapter showed, consistent with expectations, that the use of clientelism appears to diverge between high- and low-poverty municipalities when political competition is high. In contrast, where competition is low, mayors rely on clientelism at similar rates, regardless of constituent poverty.

In this chapter, I turn to a more complete test of the full theory, with its emphasis on the interaction between competition and poverty, as well as the role of partisanship, in shaping incumbent incentives for clientelism. The results of statistical analysis are consistent with theoretical expectations.

Stepping off the bus on the main road in Campo Santo, a small, impoverished municipality in Argentina's northwest, it is not difficult to find the town's social welfare office. The office is prominently located near the main entrance to the municipality and, more importantly, identifiable by the sizable crowd of residents waiting outside. The crowd is made up mostly of women, many with small children, joined by a few elderly men. Various staff members from the social welfare office are present, but only a top bureaucrat in the office, Liliana, actually attends to the crowd. The type of requests residents make vary widely: as I arrived on one occasion, an older man asked for help paying for a prescription, while later in the morning a mother came by to pick up a mattress she had recently requested so that her daughter could move out of their shared bed.

These benefits, along with others that Liliana distributes, are funded by the government – municipal, provincial, or federal. However, the treatment beneficiaries receive in Campo Santo is both personal and politicized. Liliana's desk is crowded with photos of herself with the mayor, the governor, and the lieutenant governor. Above her chair hangs a hand-drawn portrait of Juan and Eva Perón, the icons of Argentina's largest political party, the Partido Justicialista (PJ), to which both Liliana and the mayor belong.

The third-wave transitions to democracy in Latin America were met with optimism that governments in the region would become more accountable to their citizens, as well as trepidation that these transitions might collapse in the face of military coups. In most of these countries, democracy's long endurance has allayed fears of the latter. Questions about the quality of these now not-so-young democracies, however, remain extremely relevant. Scholars, citizens, and other observers increasingly recognize that it is no straightforward task to make democracy work well, and that there may be significant variation in government performance even within a single country. In spite of this growing concern with the quality of subnational democracy, our understanding of why, within a democracy, some governments perform better than others remains incomplete.

In this book, I use the case of clientelism both to illustrate the breadth of variation in government quality and to test a theory of what explains improvements in local government performance. Clientelism undermines ties of accountability between citizens and politicians. It narrows the issue space about which clients make political decisions to the question of access to particularistic goods; in doing so, it insulates politicians from the need to be responsive to the full potential range of citizen preferences. Although the costs of clientelism to accountability are widely recognized, those costs may be unevenly distributed across a country's territory.

Chapter 2 illustrated how clientelism can work as a vote-getting tool on a mass scale. Local incumbents who so choose can claim credit for the distribution of valued benefits, and citizens, worried about future access to goods crucial to their well-being, will be willing to exchange their political support for these benefits. However, though there are many strategies Argentine mayors can use to make clientelism work, not all local incumbents rely on clientelism in social policy. As the anecdotes that began this book suggest, clientelism in Argentina is widespread, but it is not ubiquitous. Officials in a minority of towns and cities explicitly deny personal responsibility for government programs and opt not to make political ties or behavior a precondition for receiving government benefits. In this chapter, I seek to understand these exceptions: within a single national political environment, why do some local incumbents opt out of clientelism?

My answer to this question relies on what I call the “audience costs” of clientelism. Although clientelism is typically targeted at the poor, there are other, nonpoor citizens in the political environment. The reactions of these nonclients to the practice of clientelism will affect a politician's incentives to rely on the practice. I argue in this chapter that the non-poor are likely to punish clientelist politicians in the voting booth.