Clientelism, Social Policy, and the Quality of Democracy

Diego Abente Brun, Larry Diamond

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781421412641
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

World-renowned scholars explore how political clientelism works and evolves in the context of modern developing democracies.

What happens when vote buying becomes a means of social policy? Although one could cynically ask this question just as easily about the United States's mature democracy, Diego Abente Brun and Larry Diamond ask this question about democracies in the developing world through an assessment of political clientelism, or what is commonly known as patronage.

Studies of political clientelism, whether deployed through traditional vote-buying techniques or through the politicized use of social spending, were a priority in the 1970s, when democratization efforts around the world flourished. With the rise of the Washington Consensus and neoliberal economic policies during the late-1980s, clientelism studies were moved to the back of the scholarly agenda.

Abente Brun and Diamond invited some of the best social scientists in the field to systematically explore how political clientelism works and evolves in the context of modern developing democracies, with particular reference to social policies aimed at reducing poverty.

Clientelism, Social Policy, and the Quality of Democracy is balanced between a section devoted to understanding clientelism's infamous effects and history in Latin America and a section that draws out implications for other regions, specifically Africa, Southeast Asia, and Eastern and Central Europe. These rich and instructive case studies glean larger comparative lessons that can help scholars understand how countries regulate the natural sociological reflex toward clientelistic ties in their quest to build that most elusive of all political structures—a fair, efficient, and accountable state based on impersonal criteria and the rule of law.

In an era when democracy is increasingly snagged on the age-old practice of patronage, students and scholars of political science, comparative politics, democratization, and international development and economics will be interested in this assessment, which calls for the study of better, more efficient, and just governance.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Evaluating Political Clientelism
• PART I LESSONS IN CLIENTELISM FROM LATIN AMERICA
• 1 Partisan Linkages and Social Policy Delivery in Argentina and Chile
• 2 Chile’s Education Transfers, 2001–2009
• 3 The Future of Peru’s Brokered Democracy
• 4 Teachers, Mayors, and the Transformation of Clientelism in Colombia
• 5 Lessons Learned While Studying Clientelistic Politics in the Gray Zone
• 6 Political Clientelism and Social Policy in Brazil
• PART II LESSONS IN CLIENTELISM FROM OTHER REGIONS
• 7 Patronage, Democracy, and Ethnic Politics in India
• 8 Linking Capital and Countryside: Patronage and Clientelism in Japan, Thailand, and the Philippines
• 9 Eastern European Postcommunist Variants of Political Clientelism and Social Policy
• 10 The Democratization of Clientelism in Sub-Saharan Africa
• Conclusion: Defining Political Clientelism’s Persistence
• Index