Browsing by Subject "Clientelism"
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
Item Open Access Connecting the Nodes. How Social Capital Enhances Local Public Goods' Provision in Shantytowns.(2017) Rojo, GuadalupeThe literature on clientelism has extensively covered the direct exchange of private goods for political support between voters and politicians. Yet, patronage does not end with the distribution of food, medicine or public employment. In poor informal settlements, access to a sanitation system or clean drinking water is often mediated by local politicians.Therefore, the interaction between slum politics and the provision of Local Public Goods (LPG) is quite relevant and requires further study.
This dissertation explains the variation in infrastructure and public services in shantytowns as a function of social capital. Well-connected communities --with stronger ties among its members-- solve collective action problems, improving slum dwellers' quality of life. The linking mechanism between social capital and LPG is electoral coordination (bloc-voting). Neighbors agree for a common electoral strategy at the slum-level, which translates into an effective mechanism to demand for improvements in their locality (``good-type partisan homogeneity'').
Alternatively, isolation among slum dwellers deteriorate their access to and quality of LPG. Under the absence of social capital, when slum-level electoral behavior appears to be homogenous, it is likely signaling political clientelism and not community-led coordination. Ultimately the ``bad-type partisan homogeneity'' represents the inability of slum dwellers to enforce electoral accountability and sanction unresponsive governments. I test my hypotheses with survey data from Udaipur (India) and eight provinces in Argentina.
Item Open Access Does Everyone Have a Price? The Demand Side of Clientelism and Vote-Buying in an Emerging Democracy(2012) Becerra Mizuno, Elda LorenaPublic opinion tools are used to look at voter motivations to engage in clientelistic practices and their variation across structures of competition.
Item Embargo Electoral Markets on the Move: Essays about the Political Economy of Migration in Latin America(2025) Villamizar Chaparro, Santiago MateoHow do local politicians in the developing world respond to inflows of migrants into their constituencies? Unlike their counterparts in the developing world, most local politicians in the Global South tend to have very binding budgetary restrictions that constrain the set of possibilities and policies they can enact. With the inflow of new individuals into their municipalities, the question of how to deal with this increased demand for social services becomes key, as does the economic and social integration of migrants. In this dissertation, I draw on research from political inequality, migration, and political economy to understand how local politicians use the arrival of migrants strategically for their own gain. I argue that local politicians try to include or exclude migrant populations within their municipalities through the manipulation of a series of tools. Particularly local spending, regulation, and party platforms or through their choice of political rhetoric. I test this argument by studying three different migratory movements across two Latin American countries. First, focusing on the Brazilian case, I study how historical migration flows from Europeans determine the contemporary geography of support for affirmative action that cues politicians about the types of political regulations they should support. This chapter also shows how the historical choices of migration policy can have effects that expand for decades. Second, I analyze under what circumstances local Colombian politicians include internally displaced people in their informal networks of good distribution and vote-buying. Lastly, focusing on the arrival of millions of Venezuelans into Colombia, I analyze the conditions under which mayoral candidates use xenophobic rhetoric for electoral gain. The empirical sections of this study combine qualitative and quantitative methods with a series of original data collection exercises like surveys, the digitization of historical archives, and social media scrapping along with pre-existing public opinion and administrative data to test the argument. Overall, I find that exposure to European migrant settlements correlates with lower support for affirmative action, that local politicians will only incorporate internal migrants in clientelistic schemes in noncompetitive environments, and that politicians will engage in xenophobic rhetoric as a result of labor market competition between natives and migrants. Understanding these results presents an important step in understanding migrant political, economic, and social incorporation in the Global South.
Item Open Access Risks and Rewards: Three Essays on Political Economy of Indian Democracy During Crises(2022) Downs-Tepper, HarlanThis dissertation investigates how politically-expedient decisions and resource constraints create winners and losers on the path toward development, focusing on slum evictions, public recordkeeping, and public health crisis response. This manuscript extends findings from prior scholarship on the politics and consequences of redistribution to understand decision-making in the context of urban informality and Covid-19 crisis response in India. I combine survey data with webscraping and remote sensing techniques to study why some urban slums were evicted while others were left intact; which areas experienced underreporting of Covid-19 mortality; and where government directed limited Covid-19 vaccine stocks. I find evidence that greater local economic activity was associated with evictions, that Covid-19 mortality counts were lower in areas aligned with the ruling coalition, and that Covid-19 vaccination supplies were strategically directed to areas of electoral importance to the ruling coalition. Taken together, these findings show that, even during crises, electoral incentives shape policy.
Item Open Access The Demand for Businessperson Politicians: How Do Businesspeople Win Electoral Nominations and Votes?(2023) Nillasithanukroh, SongkhunBusinesspeople are a highly represented occupational group in the governments of many countries. What electoral strategies do these businessperson politicians employ that afford them high electoral success? In a context where non-programmatic electoral strategies are common and when faced with strong constraints on the utilization of personal, party, and public resources for distributive purposes, I argue that businessperson candidates' access to private sector resources provides them with an alternative set of distributive resources that can be used to pursue political support, thereby granting businessperson candidates with an electoral advantage over other occupational groups.
Businessperson candidates are able to distribute private sector jobs to build an army of political workers who can provide political services. To test my arguments, I conducted list experiments with 986 employees in firms of businessperson candidates in Thailand. I find that employees in firms of businessperson candidates provide political services such as voting for the businessperson candidate, attending rallies, persuading acquaintances to support the businessperson candidate, and distributing goods and services produced by the firm to voters. Businessperson candidates, however, face a risk of shirking by patronage employees once hired. To overcome the commitment problem, I find that businessperson candidates rely on monitoring and negative inducements, in the form of employment termination threats, to mobilize these patronage employees to provide political services.