In Votes for Survival, Simeon Nichter argues that to understand the puzzling persistence of clientelism across the globe, research needs to shift attention from electoral machine politics to long-term clientelistic exchange relationships beyond elections and to take the role of citizens into account. Although others have written about the continuous nature of clientelistic practices, as well as the perspective of citizens within such networks, Nichter weaves together these two perspectives to study clien- telism in a new and insightful way. For instance, he shows that strategies designed to combat clientelistic behavior are timed around elections and mainly focus on incentivizing elites to abstain from engaging in machine politics. By factoring in the demand side of clientelism, Nichter adds to efforts to solve the puzzle of the persistence of clientelism across the globe, even in contexts detrimental to electoral forms of clientelism.
After introducing the puzzle at hand, Nichter gives an overview of the research literature on electoral clientelism, in chapter 2. To do so, he draws on a large body of research on different electoral contingent exchange strategies, research to which he himself contributed extensively. Capitalizing on the Brazilian case, Nichter shows that despite the success of structural change, institutional reforms, legal enforcement, and partisan strategies in countering the logic of electoral clientelism, we still find patron-client networks. To explain this finding, he points out that remedies against clientelism are, on the one hand, usually limited to the period of electoral campaigns, and on the other hand, aim to alter the incentives of elites to engage in electoral clientelism.
Nichter then presents the core argument of the book. In chapter 3, he defines the concept of relational clientelism as contingent exchange relationships evolving beyond election campaigns. After exposing the resilience of relational clientelism to most of the remedies discussed in chapter 2, which are designed to tackle electoral clientelism, Nichter turns to the logic and mechanisms sustaining the phenomenon. His theoretical arguments are based on two citizen-centered mechanisms, resulting from citizens’ need to cope with vulnerabilities: declared support and requesting benefits. Both of these mechanisms are aimed at solving one side of the dual credibility problem inherent in relational clientelism: both clients and patrons need to gauge each other’s trustworthiness to follow through with their promises.
In contrast to other researchers, Nichter does not explain citizens’ motivation to engage in relational clientelism with nonrational factors, like reciprocity, gratitude, or loyalty, but highlights that in the face of deficient welfare protection schemes, citizens can rationally opt into clientelistic relationships, since these may serve as a functional equivalent. Therefore, in chapter 4, he shows that while poverty plays an important role in clientelism, rising incomes may not be enough to break clientelistic relationships if citizens are still vulnerable to the risk of falling back into poverty; for example, through sickness, unemployment, or natural disasters.
In the following two chapters (5 and 6), Nichter moves on to test his arguments on declared support and requesting benefits in Brazil. On the basis of data collected in several years of fieldwork, he is able to support his arguments with qualitative and quantitative evidence. Concerning the first mechanism, he shows that citizens use declarations of support, such as showing campaign paraphernalia or participating in rallies, to signal their trustworthiness to clientelist politicians. A for the second mechanism, Nichter highlights that citizens are also active participants in clientelistic relationships beyond elections by requesting benefits from clientelist politicians, thereby screening their credibility. Particularly the latter mechanism turns conventional assumptions of clientelistic (elite) targeting upside down. Moreover, regression analyses confirm the effectiveness of both mechanisms, showing that declarers for victorious candidates and requesters are indeed more likely to receive postelection benefits.
While these two chapters themselves provide an impressive amount of evidence substantiating Nichter’s theoretical claims, the interested reader may find additional supporting documentation in a more-than-50-page appendix included in the book, as well as in Nichter’s previously published work.
Moreover, in chapter 7, Nichter applies his arguments beyond the Brazilian case. He provides evidence in support of the two demand-side mechanisms from Mexico and Argentina, as well as other regions of the world. Although the evidence provided in this chapter does not reach the depth and coverage of the data presented for Brazil, this chapter convincingly shows that the two mechanisms proposed in the book apply to other contexts prone to clientelism as well. Nichter concludes with a discussion of the consequences of relational clientelism, along with further avenues to study the demand side of clientelistic exchange relationships.
Although Nichter’s book is an extraordinary example of research on clientelism, it still leaves the reader with a few ensuing questions. First, how do citizens signal their trustworthiness between elections? While Nichter conceptualizes relational clientelism as contingent exchange beyond elections, his demand-side—driven mechanism of declared support can be observed only during election campaigns. Which makes it difficult to discern if this mechanism aims to sustain electoral or relational clientelism, or both. This leads to the second question: how to clearly disentangle electoral from relational clientelism if the latter may also build on contingent exchange during election campaigns. Future research should identify ways for clients to prove their trustworthiness to their patrons beyond elections and to further sharpen the boundaries between electoral and relational clientelism.
The book makes three important contributions to the study of clientelism. First, that machine politics is not confined to election campaigns, extends beyond election campaigns, and develops over time. Second, that this form of (long-term) relational clientelism builds on the compliance of elites as much as it does on the compliance of citizens involved in these exchange relationships. Third, that it is not just the level of income that drives citizens to sustain clientelistic networks, but also their vulnerability to fall into poverty due to adverse risks, like illness, unemployment, or drought. By highlighting the relational nature of the phenomenon and putting an emphasis on the demand side of clientelism, Nichter convincingly shows that new, additional strategies are in order to remedy the full scope of the phenomenon.
