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Clientelism is characterized by the combination of particularistic targeting and contingency-based exchange. This method of contingent exchange thrives in both autocracies and democracies. It exists in a large variety of cultural contexts. Confronted with economic development, clientelism fades away in some political contexts but adapts and survives in others. This article explores our understanding of the origins and dynamics of clientelism, focusing on the relationships between clientelism and democracy and between clientelism and development. It then evaluates the connection between clientelism and a variety of political and economic outcomes, including democratic accountability, corruption, and public goods provision. It concludes by outlining some remaining empirical and theoretical challenges and highlighting recent innovations in data collection and empirical methods.

Clientelism is charatacterized by the combination of particularistic targeting and contingency-based exchange. This method of contingent exchange thrives in both autocracies and democracies. It exists in a large variety of cultural contexts. Confronted with economic development, clientelism fades away in some political contexts but adapts and survives in others. This article explores our understanding of the origins and dynamics of clientelism, focusing on the relationships between clientelism and democracy and between clientelism and development. It then evaluates the connection between clientelism and a variety of political and economic outcomes, including democratic accountability, corruption, and public goods provision. It concludes by outlining some remaining empirical and theoretical challenges and highlighting recent innovations in data collection and empirical methods. Adapted from the source document.

Electoral clientelism or vote buying has been regarded as undermining democratic institutions and weakening the accountability of the state towards its citizens, especially the poor. Social identity as a form of political mobilization may contribute to this, enabling support to be won with clientelist transfers. This paper reports data from a novel laboratory experiment designed to examine whether clientelism can be sustained as a political strategy, and whether identity impacts the nature or efficacy of clientelism. Specifically, we design a voting and leadership game in order to examine whether individuals vote for clientelist allocations by a leader even at the expense of more efficient and egalitarian allocations. We find group identity does not significantly impact the prevalence of clientelist plans. Leaders are more likely, however, to choose allocations that provide fewer benefits (lower rents) to themselves when they are part of the majority in-group than when they are in the minority.

Political clientelism is a dyadic relation in which a politician (the patron) gives material goods and services to a citizen (the client), in exchange for political support. If, at different stages of this relationship, both the patron and the client have incentives to defect and not honor informal agreements, what makes clientelism self-enforcing? The following paper presents a game-theoretical model of political clientelism in which a candidate disciplines a majority of voters through the promise of a future flow of benefits. A mixed strategy involving a randomized allocation of resources among constituencies makes clientelism feasible when the politician's action is contingent on the result of the election. Higher campaign budgets and lower voter aversion towards clientelistic parties, as well as higher patience and higher heterogeneity across groups of voters, make clientelism more likely. Swing voters tend to be gifted more frequently than core supporters with this frequency increasing as group heterogeneity increases, presenting a positive association.

Unlike much of the growing literature on political clientelism, this short paper contains mainly the author's general reflections on the broad issues of governance (or mis-governance including corruption), democracy, and state capacity that clientelism has an impact on. It then analyses how its incidence changes with the process of development, and the kind of policy issues that it generates. Finally, the paper suggests some research gaps in this literature.

In the previous issue of this journal (ROAPE 84), the author argued that international anti‐corruption efforts created conflicts between aid donors and African debtor governments because they attacked the ability of local interests to control and appropriate state resources. The control of corruption is an essential element in the legitimation of liberal democracy and in the promotion of global markets. However, it also threatens the local accumulation of wealth and property (dependent as it is on access to the state) in post‐colonial Africa. This article explores another dimension of this problem, namely the way in which clientelist forms of political mobilisation have promoted corruption and intensified crisis. Clientelism has been a key mechanism through which political interests have built the electoral support necessary to ensure access to the state's resources. In turn, it has shaped a politics of factional competition over power and resources, a politics obsessed with the division of the political spoils. The article argues that this process is not unique to Africa. What is different, however, is that factional conflict and its attendant corruption have had such devastating consequences. This reflects the particular forms which clientelism has taken on the continent. There is a need, it concludes, to find ways to shift African politics towards issues of social justice and government performance and away from a concern with a division of the state's resources.

The extant literature on clientelism has tended to focus on large parties. This article asks what happens to small parties that operate in an electoral system dominated by large clientelistic parties. Our case study is the Romanian National Liberal Party (PNL). During the last two decades, it has become the second-largest party in Romania. This is unusual because the liberals in post-communist countries are politically weak. The main base of liberal support is typically urban middle classes. By contrast, PNL's electoral base is in the economically underdeveloped rural world. Using electoral statistics, economic datasets, and qualitative analysis, we demonstrate that PNL's success was due to pork-barrel spending and the development of clientelistic networks in which local mayors play a key role. PNL was able to grow by following the example of the dominant parties and creating networks of loyal mayors. In turn, this opens perspectives for research about clientelism in small communities, as well as comparative studies based on small parties.

This study argues that economic vulnerability causes citizens to participate in clientelism, a phenomenon with various pernicious consequences. To examine how reduced vulnerability affects citizens' participation in clientelism, we employ two exogenous shocks to vulnerability. First, we designed a randomized control trial to reduce household vulnerability: our development intervention constructed residential water cisterns in drought-prone areas of Brazil. Second, we exploit rainfall shocks. We find that reducing vulnerability significantly decreases requests for private goods from politicians, especially among citizens likely to be in clientelist relationships. Moreover, reducing vulnerability decreases votes for incumbent mayors, who typically have more resources for clientelism. (JEL D72, H41, I38, O12, O17, Q54)

"Clientelism in Latin American Politics" published on by Oxford University Press.