This chapter argues that contemporary electoral clientelism focused on vote buying is more vulnerable to failure than robust prior forms of political clientelism. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century oligarchic clientelism, as well as mid twentieth-century corporatist clientelism, entangled the provision of benefits with employment and social protection. They thus raised the costs of defection so high that opposed recipients had strong incentives to comply. In contrast, contemporary electoral clientelism offers much lower-value gifts and limits the costs of noncompliance to foregone future benefits. Under these conditions, recipients’ personal political dispositions weigh more heavily in their vote choices, leading vote-buying attempts to fail when the conditions that I characterize in the rest of the book activate those dispositions. The chapter also describes Mexico’s transition from corporatist clientelism during most of the twentieth century under Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) rule to the new practice of electoral clientelism since national-level democratization in 2000.

This final chapter on mechanisms argues that recipients of electoral gifts have a partisan view of ballot secrecy. When opposition recipients only see machine representatives in their voting place on Election Day, they fear that ballot secrecy could be compromised and are more likely to believe the machine’s threats to impose costly sanctions for voting their sincere preferences. Recipient compliance is thus more likely in machine-dominant constituencies. When recipients also see opposing-party representatives at the polls, they are prone to believe that ballot secrecy is preserved and that they can vote their true preferences without incurring costs. This argument provides a new rationale for the protective influence of poll watchers and adds nuance to the standard institutional claim that de jure ballot secrecy alone undermines vote buying. Tests use observational survey data, survey experiments, and fieldwork in Mexico.

This introductory chapter describes the stakes of successful vote buying for new democracies and the deep pessimism of current perspectives. Despite the standard assumption embedded in existing theories that politicians only buy votes when the practice is guaranteed to be effective, meta-analyses of empirical research show that it typically fails. I introduce my partisan competition theory of electoral clientelism, which can better explain why vote-buying attempts success or fail. I argue that competitive elections can shift the balance of power from political machines to citizens, implying more optimistic outlook on elections, the voting behavior of poor citizens, and political representation in new democracies. Before outlining the remainder of the book, I introduce Mexico as a typical case of a new democracy awash in vote buying with subnational variation in the degree of partisan competition over time. I also introduce Argentina, Colombia, and Turkey as critical case tests of the mechanisms implied by the partisan competition theory.

The concluding chapter discusses the optimistic implications of my findings for the quality of elections, the voting behavior of poor citizens, the conceptualization of clientelist democracies, and the viability of political representation and accountability in new democracies. Vote buying still represents a drain on public budgets and inefficient social investment, but because competition makes poor voters more resistant to electoral clientelism than currently assumed, the electoral connection that underwrites democratic governance can operate in competitive constituencies. I draw out the public policy implications of my findings for opposition political parties, election management bodies, and democracy promotion efforts to fight vote buying and help transform clients into citizens.

This chapter tests the book’s main argument and the three proposed mechanisms by analyzing the effectiveness of vote-buying schemes in Argentina, Colombia, and Turkey. To avoid repetition, I highlight one mechanism per country, using a critical-case approach. In Colombia’s 2022 elections, weak partisanship and an atomized party system imply that recipients might respond instrumentally to electoral gifts. Nevertheless, using a conjoint experiment, I show strong partisan response, thus highlighting the low bar for partisan affinity to disrupt machine politics. Competitive authoritarianism in Turkey should bias elections in the incumbent’s favor, but I show that local competition for the Kurdish vote and intensive campaigns in the 2015 elections caused the incumbent party to target many unbuyable voters and made the vote buying strategy to fail nationally. Finally, in Argentina the use of partisan ballots should increase recipient compliance. Employing observational data and a photo-based survey experiment from the 2021 elections, I instead show that recipients believe in ballot secrecy and vote their true preferences where prior local electoral competition was vibrant but comply by voting for the machine where it had been locally dominant. The findings from these three critical-case tests show the surprisingly weak conditions that can make vote buying ineffective and imply that my argument generalizes to other competitive systems rife with clientelism.

This is the first of three chapters on the mechanisms that translate the effects of electoral competitiveness into the success or failure of vote buying. Here, I provide a new argument for recipients’ responses to vote-buying offers. Existing theory rooted in instrumentalist microfoundations predicts that all demographically similar voters respond equally to electoral gifts of a given value, thus making all voters potentially buyable. Drawing on the motivated reasoning literature in political science and the gifting literature in behavioral economics, I argue that responses to electoral gifts are conditioned by preexisting partisanship. Even though all recipients appreciate the gift’s economic value, partisans assign it different symbolic value due to inferences about the machine’s rationale for targeting them. Initial supporters respond positively, inferring that the machine cares about their welfare, whereas initial opponents respond negatively, inferring that the machine seeks to manipulate their vote. Partisan responses limit the market for votes by putting many opposed recipients out of the machine’s reach. Tests compare the predictions of standard “equal response” theory to my partisan response model using fieldwork observations, survey data, and conjoint experiments in Mexico.

This chapter provides a bookend test of my main hypothesis that the intensity of local electoral competition conditions the effectiveness of vote-buying attempts. I use specialized election-season panel surveys of Mexican citizens to assess the impact of electoral gifts on vote choices from the onset of national-level democracy in 2000 until 2018. Results show that vote buying typically fails in competitive constituencies and only succeeds where the machine was already electorally dominant for nonclientelist reasons. The rest of the chapter provides robustness tests. I use multiple approaches to measure vote-buying attempts, including direct and indirect self-reports from recipients and the PRI’s intent to treat constituencies with electoral gifts. Tests for endogeneity include sensitivity analysis and instrumental variables models, as well as time series and fixed effects models at the municipal level.

This second chapter on mechanisms argues that competitive elections cause machines to target many unbuyable voters with electoral gifts. Vote buying is effective when recipients vote for the machine but would have voted for a rival party had they not received a gift. Existing research shows that machines select clients based on citizens’ observable pre-campaign dispositions. Yet the unknowable effects of the subsequent campaigns can shift recipients’ vote-relevant attitudes enough to make some initially buyable voters unbuyable by Election Day. Machines in competitive constituencies thus make many unavoidable targeting errors. Campaign effects are muted in constituencies that the machine already dominates electorally, leading to more efficient targeting and more effective vote buying. Tests use a variety of measurement techniques and election-season panel surveys from Mexico between 2000 and 2018.

If a mobilized constituency for programmatism is one way out of a weak-state trap, then the state or external actors pushing for increased state capacity is another. I argue that intermediaries who informally link the state to citizens comprise a constituency against such a change, and may block this pathway out. The empirics in this chapter travel outside Senegal because observing resistance from intermediaries requires a real or perceived shock to state capacity. A within-country analysis in Mali first explores the types of local actors who would be willing to participate in a forthcoming local governance initiative to limit corruption and discretionary spending: performance-based financing of municipalities. The most embedded local leaders (who have operated longest and have the most social ties in the community) benefit more from clientelistic transfers from the mayor and are least willing to agree to monitor mayoral performance under the new initiative. Then, leveraging a recent coordinated set of field experiments evaluating formalization interventions, I tell the stories of backlash in three of the six country cases by intermediaries who benefit from the status quo.

If clientelistic politics are standing in the way of the potential for electoral competition to induce investment in state-building, might the decline of clientelism be a way out of the weak-state trap? This chapter considers the case of urban Senegal, where the role of informal intermediaries as political brokers has been on the decline – at least in Dakar, which is home to most informal businesses. Using historical, geographic, and electoral data, I first show that collective clientelism, while still a prominent phenomenon in rural Senegal, has declined over time in Dakar, where it used to be a dominant strategy. Interview data suggest this is due to the decline in demand for locally excludable goods and the decline in reliance on social networks and local leaders. Instead of turning to programmatic candidates, the case indicates that many urban voters instead move from patronage politics to populism, attracted by charismatic leaders and populist promises. This suggests that programmatism is not a necessary substitute for clientelism and that the reduction of clientelistic politics is not sufficient to spur a programmatic transition.

This chapter of Persistent Citizens investigates the role of partisanship as an alternative or complementary explanation for variation in state-centric persistence and the "2ei" attitudes (i.e., entitlement, indignation, and self-efficacy). The authors analyze whether support for major political movements in each country – the Workers’ Party in Brazil and the Peronist movement in Argentina – affects citizens’ attitudes and behaviors toward the state. The findings reveal a significant contrast between the two cases. In Brazil, partisan identity has little to no explanatory power. In Argentina, in contrast, Peronist supporters show systematically different attitudes and a greater willingness to persist than non-supporters. Analysis of additional survey questions suggests that differences in attitudes among Peronist supporters are not the result of greater reliance on clientelism but instead reflect greater optimism about the state’s capacity to provide services. Despite this partisan effect in Argentina, the chapter concludes that the book’s core findings regarding the importance of 2ei remain robust in both countries.

Beginning in the 1970s, corporatism became a key concept for analyzing state–society relations in Latin America, particularly in the context of authoritarian regimes. It offered an alternative to pluralist models, providing a lens to examine state control over interest group politics. This chapter traces the conceptual development of corporatism in the Latin American literature, highlighting two early features: (1) convergence around core definitions, and (2) a shared view of corporatism as a subtype of the broader category of interest intermediation. As scholarship progressed, conceptual innovations emerged. These included (3) revising the overarching concept to incorporate overlapping or conflicting meanings, and (4) differentiating between classical subtypes, where corporatism is present along with added traits, and radial subtypes, where a core attribute is missing. This refined conceptualization contrasts with a broader tradition that equated corporatism with an Iberic-Latin legacy of hierarchical state authority. That tradition has drawn criticism for lumping diverse cases into one category and for advancing overly broad claims. Nonetheless, the chapter urges caution in dismissing this broader usage, suggesting that while flawed, it may still hold analytical value. In all, the chapter underscores the value of conceptual precision and innovation in the comparative study of group politics.

This chapter illustrates the importance of ongoing engagement with conceptual analysis when conducting research. It focuses on clientelism, a phenomenon in which politicians provide material benefits to citizens in direct exchange for political support. The chapter presents four typologies that refine the overarching concept of clientelism by revealing underlying dimensions, explicating subtypes, and reducing conceptual ambiguity. More specifically, the typologies clarify four key points: (1) campaign handouts can be used for both persuasion and mobilization; (2) campaign handouts can also shape the composition of the electorate; (3) a key distinction exists between electoral and relational clientelism; and (4) some scholarly usage of the term “vote buying” involves conceptual stretching. More broadly, the chapter suggests that continued engagement with conceptual analysis can yield important insights and analytical leverage. The typologies discussed not only improve conceptual clarity but also prove to be foundational for further formal and empirical research on the topic.

This chapter examines how narratives of corruption are mobilized by two very different political actors in Latin America: marginalized rural farmers and free-market think tank elites. We show that, for each group, corruption is both a central element of political discourse and a tool for shaping state–society relations and advancing particular interests. Their narratives serve to define the boundaries of corruption, interpret the state, and drive and justify political action within changing historical contexts – for Colombian farmers, a state that has become newly consequential to their lives; and for right-wing think tank elites, a left turn in regional politics. The comparison demonstrates that while each group uses similar narratives, their different social positions and networks shape the actions they take in response: Farmers rely on clientelist networks to access the few state resources left to them by elite corruption, while elites engage in a hegemonic struggle against leftist populism. Paradoxically, even while sharing a strikingly similar understanding of corruption, each group condemns the practices of the other as corrupt. This analysis underscores the ubiquity of corruption as a strategic and moralizing tool in Latin American politics.