The Demand Side of Clientelism
Final Report Abstract
This project has investigated the role of citizens in clientelism, what we call the demand side of clientelism. The results of the project confirm the key and complex role that citizens play for sustaining or challenging clientelistic relationships. The findings in this project highlight several key issues that are relevant for the future of research on clientelism and of clientelism itself. First, theoretically, there is need to consolidate the conception of clientelism incorporating the client perspective. There is still enormous disagreement in the scholarly community on what clientelism is, what is its nature and characteristics and whether it is detrimental to citizen welfare. In the theoretical work of this project we have proposed a new definition of clientelism and a new typology that is broad enough to encompass the subject matter of many researchers working on clientelism and that incorporates the key role that clients play. This brings us to the second key lesson from our project. There are indeed different types of clientelism that are empirically and theoretically distinct. They involve different goods and different relationships between patrons and clients. Citizens in developing democracies note these differences and have highly differentiated views of these different types of clientelism. From the perspective of understanding the citizen side of clientelism, acknowledging this implies the need to move on from a simplistic but still dominant view of clients as passive citizens willing to “sell their vote” provided they are poor enough. Citizens face different trade-offs when exposed to different types of clientelism. These trade-offs include, prominently, different moral evaluations embedded in the different clientelism types, such as the inequality of the relationship between patrons and clients, the size of the beneficiary group and how valuable the goods are. For the international community studying and dealing with clientelism, this also implies that rather than judging clientelism altogether positively or negatively, we should start taking a more refined view of clientelism as well. As much as citizens pay close attention to different aspects of clientelism, we should as well, and we should also, not only design interventions to tell citizens in clientelism settings that clientelism is wrong but to also listen and learn from their differentiated evaluations. Third, more concretely, our findings point to a long-term persistence of relational and collective types of clientelism. These types were seen in a positive light by citizens which implies that three are no social cost associated with these exchanges and no mobilization against clientelism is likely. This stands in stark contrast to the assessments of the literature on clientelism that emphasizes problems of democracy, accountability, corruption, and efficient resource allocation. For disadvantaged citizens in developing democracies, the main source of discontent about relational and collective types was exclusion from these exchanges not the perception that these exchanges are not legitimate. Fourth, our project provides insights useful to design interventions to address clientelism. Our work on accountability and information processing highlights the attachment citizens have to “high quality” relational clientelistic patrons. Relational clientelistic patrons can generate feelings of loyalty and attachment that are comparable to ethnic or partisan ties. We show that attachment to relational patrons can reduce concerns about corruption and service delivery. The mechanisms work through motivated reasoning, where positive information about the relational patrons is registered but negative information is not processed further. This implies that policy interventions to strengthen accountability in the form of providing information about programmatic performance might not be very effective in contexts where relational clientelism is important. NGOs and government or international agencies may spend tremendous efforts disseminating programmatic performance information assuming ignorance of the part of citizens, but citizens attached to relational patrons may simply ignore these efforts. Our work, on the other hand, highlights that citizen are sensitive to the behavior of courts. Strengthening courts can help mobilize citizens against corrupt clientelistic practices from government officials. In particular, we find a potential positive feedback loop where institutions credibly signal their willingness to address corrupt practices, citizens come to trust those institutions more and direct resources toward them. Potentially, future interventions could thus focus less on the citizens directly but rather on institutional actors.
Publications
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2020. "Clientelism from the Client’s Perspective: A Meta-Analysis of Ethnographic Literature." Perspectives on Politics, online: 1-17
Pellicer, Miquel, Eva Wegner, Markus Bayer, and Christian Tischmeyer
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2021. "Court performance and citizen attitudes toward fighting corruption." Governance
Barbabela, Letícia, Miquel Pellicer, and Eva Wegner
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2021. "Poor people’s beliefs and the dynamics of clientelism." Journal of Theoretical Politics 33 (3):300-32
Pellicer, Miquel, Eva Wegner, Lindsay J. Benstead, and Ellen Lust
