Clientelism has been one of the hottest subjects in political science and comparative politics in the past decade, and perhaps no contribution to the subject has been more eagerly anticipated than Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism. Springing from an early collaboration among three of the authors on a project about clientelism in Argentina, this book evolved over the course of the past decade into a broad comparative study of distributive politics and a work of major theoretical import.
Brokers deserves every bit of attention it will garner. It makes sense of disparate patterns of distributive politics across the world, much of which contradicts our current workhorse theories and received wisdom. Succumbing to the powerful logic that already committed voters do not need to be bribed, scholars have assumed that parties shower gifts on the as-yet-undecided in exchange for votes. Stokes admits falling into such a trap in an earlier work. But in fact, parties invest disproportionate resources on already committed voters. Drawing from an impressive array of primary survey data, including the 2000 Mexican panel data and their own original surveys of 800 Argentine party brokers in four provinces, thousands of Argentine and Venezuelan voters (the former multiple times over the course of a decade), and thousands of members of local village councils in three Indian states, the authors provide conclusive evidence that machine largesse was bestowed on loyal, not swing, voters from Córdoba to Caracas to Karnataka. In one of the book’s cleverest empirical tests, they tap the Venezuelan “Maisanta database” of nearly 12.4 million Venezuelan voters that was assembled by government forces ahead of the 2004 presidential recall referendum to demonstrate that “patriots” who had signed a recall petition against opposition deputies received double the benefits of government programs (known as the “social missions”) of those who had not signed a petition, and four times more than those who had signed the recall petition against the president.
To solve the puzzle of why parties should make such apparently inefficient investments, the authors focus on the role of the brokers who mobilize voters for the party machines. Brokers are socially embedded in the neighborhoods where they live and work. They know the locals—and know what and how much they need to be offered in order to harvest their votes. But they are also self-interested rent seekers who siphon off party resources and deliver only as many votes as is necessary for the party to win the next election. For the lower-level broker who is rewarded for delivering numbers, buying the vote of a loyal partisan is cheaper and easier than risking their resources on a swing voter whose support the party covets but who may or may not come around. From the standpoint of the party, relying on brokers thus carries electoral costs as well as benefits. As such, the interests of brokers and party leaders are bound to clash, and party leaders grudgingly rely on them to deliver votes only where and for as long as such a strategy is the most effective. Because of the diminishing marginal utility of incomes, this happens where people are poor. Eventually, however, economic development and industrialization, along with the rise of direct modes of communication, engender a larger, wealthier, harder-to-monitor, and easier-to-reach electorate, which, in turn, increases the returns to scale for investments in public goods and undermines vote-buying. When that happens, party leaders will turn against their own machines. Now ready to compete on program, they accept the secret ballot and other reform measures.
Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism is a model of theoretical precision, conceptual clarity, and impeccable logical reasoning, and its measured inferences, which are supported by exhaustive, careful empirical work, are placed within a proud tradition pioneered by V. O. Key, David Mayhew, Edward Banfield, and other intellectual giants who young scholars often do not take the time to read. There are lessons here for young (and established) scholars: Theory should be supported by facts and facts informed by theory; there is no excuse for testing important hypotheses with weak proxy variables; and good books take time, and occasionally several collaborators, to produce. The authors also remind us that some enduring questions in our discipline have normative as well as empirical implications. Even if vote-buying does boost voter turnout and allows the poor to leverage their votes to secure greater resources, hidden rules typically conceal injustice and the practice of discouraging the poor from making expressive choices in elections while other, wealthier citizens are encouraged to do so breaches the principle of the equality of political rights so fundamental to a democracy.
This ambitious book will become the essential reference for future work on parties, public policy, and political representation, and will undoubtedly spawn many fertile lines of research. But even as it advances our knowledge of how clientelism works, its laudable effort to understand what gives rise to and kills clientelism generates questions worth grappling with about the role of structural forces and strategic considerations in the transition of party systems to programmatic politics. Connecting the micro-logic of broker-mediated distribution to macro-political outcomes, Brokers contends that economic development eventually brings parties to a tipping point at which investments in public goods and direct communication make more sense than relying on brokers who are serving their own agendas. Setting aside the question of whether we can even assume that economic development will take place given the inefficiencies of patronage- and pork-ridden systems, why party leaders should ultimately settle on this particular solution is not clear. The authors provide a compelling explanation for the demise of vote-buying, but no clear theory for why the party leaders’ strong motivations to sidestep their brokers would necessarily lead them to embrace programmatic politics over other non-programmatic forms of group-based spending. Party leaders could, for instance, instead deliver club goods as a quid pro quo for votes. The book’s tentative evidence that party leaders decisively turned against their machines and their brokers at the predicted moment, especially in the United States, moreover, is not overwhelming. Even if capacity, rather than strategy, accounts for the late and incomplete decline of the political machine in the United States, without a smoking gun we do not know if party leaders colluded to cut out the middle man. Nor does the modified theoretical model of party leader choices specify why party leaders should have common interests in undermining their own party machines. Such convergence could be plausible if buying the votes of now wealthier and more sophisticated partisans is their only alternative, but if they may deliver non-conditional benefits to individuals under murky rules, or dole out pork, it is less so. Unless structural forces so overwhelm the electorate that they trump strategic considerations and completely shut down the patronage market—a dubious assumption—should not one party try to gain a competitive advantage over its competitors?
The onus is not on Stokes, Dunning, Nazareno, and Brusco to resolve these questions. They have done their part. But such fundamental questions about the political representation of citizens in emerging and established democracies deserve no less than our collective best efforts in the years ahead.
