Conditionality & Coercion

Electoral clientelism in Eastern Europe

Isabela Mares and Lauren E. Young

Oxford Studies in Democratization

A comprehensive analysis of the way electoral clientelism work
Systematic exploration of illegal forms of campaigning through novel survey techniques, survey-based experiments, and ethnographic research
Provides a comparative framework covering two different contemporary election systems

Conditionality & Coercion

Electoral clientelism in Eastern Europe

Isabela Mares and Lauren E. Young

Oxford Studies in Democratization

Description

In many recent democracies, candidates compete for office using illegal strategies to influence voters. In Hungary and Romania, local actors including mayors and bureaucrats offer access to social policy benefits to voters who offer to support their preferred candidates, and they threaten others with the loss of a range of policy and private benefits for voting the "wrong" way. These quid pro quo exchanges are often called clientelism. How can politicians and their accomplices get away with such illegal campaigning in otherwise democratic, competitive elections? When do they rely on the worst forms of clientelism that involve threatening voters and manipulating public benefits?

Conditionality and Coercion: Electoral Clientelism in Eastern Europe uses a mixed method approach to understand how illegal forms of campaigning including vote buying and electoral coercion persist in two democratic countries in the European Union. It argues that we must disaggregate clientelistic strategies based on whether they use public or private resources, and whether they involve positive promises or negative threats and coercion. We document that the type of clientelistic strategies that candidates and brokers use varies systematically across localities based on their underlying social coalitions. We also show that voters assess and sanction different forms of clientelism in different ways. Voters glean information about politicians' personal characteristics and their policy preferences from the clientelistic strategies these candidates deploy.

Most voters judge candidates who use clientelism harshly. So how does clientelism, including its most odious coercive forms, persist in democratic systems? This book suggests that politicians can get away with clientelism by using forms of it that are in line with the policy preferences of constituencies whose votes they need. Clientelistic and programmatic strategies are not as distinct as previous have argued.

Oxford Studies in Democratization is a series for scholars and students of comparative politics and related disciplines. Volumes concentrate on the comparative study of the democratization process that accompanied the decline and termination of the cold war. The geographical focus of the series is primarily Latin America, the Caribbean, Southern and Eastern Europe, and relevant experiences in Africa and Asia. The series editor is Laurence Whitehead, Senior Research Fellow, Nuffield College, University of Oxford.

Conditionality & Coercion

Electoral clientelism in Eastern Europe

Isabela Mares and Lauren E. Young

Oxford Studies in Democratization

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
List of Figures
1. Introduction
2. Disaggregating clientelism: resource constraints and information signals
3. Context and research design
4. Policy favors
5. Policy coercion: social conflict and control
6. Economic coercion: conflict and forbearance
7. Vote buying: Nontargeted and unmonitored
8. Conclusion
Appendices
Appendix A: Qualitative Interviews
Appendix B. Locality Surveys
Appendix C Survey Experiments
Notes
References
Index

Conditionality & Coercion

Electoral clientelism in Eastern Europe

Isabela Mares and Lauren E. Young

Oxford Studies in Democratization

Author Information

Isabela Mares, Professor of Political Science, Yale University,Lauren E. Young, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California Davis

Isabela Mares is Professor of Political Science at Yale University. She has written extensively on a range of topics in comparative politics and political economy, including democratization, clientelism and corruption, taxation and fiscal capacity development, social policy reforms in both developed and developing countries. She is the author of The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development (New York: Cambridge University Press), for which she won the Gregory Luebbert Award for best book in Comparative Politics (awarded by the American Political Science Assciation, 2004), she also won the First Best Book in European Studies award (Council for European Studies, 2004) and received an Honorable Mention from the American Political Science Association.
At Yale, Isabela Mares is teaching courses in political economy, welfare state development, democratization and democratic erosion, and an interdisciplinary graduate course on Micro-historical Analysis in Comparative Research.

Lauren E. Young is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at UC Davis. She received her Ph.D. in political science with distinction from Columbia University and was a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law (CDDRL) at Stanford, and the Center for Global Development (CGD) (non-resident). She is a member of the Evidence in Governance and Politics (EGAP) network and a co-organizer of the California Workshop on Empirical Political Science and the 2019 WPSA Autocratic Politics pre-conference.
Her research aims to understand how individuals make decisions when faced with the threat of violence. She has been published in the American Political Science Review, Annual Review of Political Science, the Journal of Peace Research, and Comparative Political Studies.

Conditionality & Coercion

Electoral clientelism in Eastern Europe

Isabela Mares and Lauren E. Young

Oxford Studies in Democratization

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the APSA William Riker Award for the best book in Political Economy
Honourable Mention from the Gregory Luebbert Award

"Mares and Young use both ethnographic and survey evidence to analyze everyday politics in poor rural regions of Hungary and Romania. Local politicians use their discretion in allocating state resources to buy votes; they also exploit political differences within the community by applying welfare programs in a coercive manner, thus attracting support from the working poor. This signaling blurs the distinction between clientilistic and programmatic appeals. Threats seem to be more effective than gifts, and employers or moneylenders are often used as intermediaries. Such tactics are used by parties on both the Right and the Left. A flawed electoral system combines with such factors as corruption and poverty to lead to widespread disillusionment with the efficacy of democracy. Exemplary in its use of both qualitative and quantitative methods, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of electoral politics around the world." -- P. Rutland, Wesleyan University, CHOICE

"Mares and Young deliver a theoretically incisive and methodologically innovative analysis of clientelistic practices in postcommunist polities that is obligatory reading for any student of electoral politics. It vividly demonstrates that different forms of clientelism, and particularly the prevalence of coercive modes of targeted political exchange, are embedded in distinctive social and political settings. Empirically, the authors base their analysis on some of the highestquality data ever collected in the study of clientelism, both through systematic surveys as well as through ethnographic work with hundreds of qualitative interviews yielding empirically and theoretically pertinent-if not shocking-insights." -- Herbert Kitschelt, Duke University

"Conditionality and Coercion fills an important gap in the study of clientelism by explaining when and why politicians use different strategies at their disposal, and particularly how they balance positive and negative inducements. Mares and Young's most novel theoretical intuition is that the choice of strategies sends informational signals to voters, extending the reach of any clientelistic exchange beyond its recipient. Policymakers and students of democracy have much to learn from this innovative book about the often subtle ways coercion is deployed for electoral gain." -- Jessica Gottlieb, Texas A&M

"Combining evidence from largescale surveys and intensive fieldwork, Isabela Mares and Lauren Young show how and why politicians mix different clientelistic strategies-including crucially both persuasion and coercion-to signal their policy preferences. Scholars of clientelism and Eastern European politics will benefit equally from reading this outstanding book." -- Thad Dunning, University of California Berkeley

"This sophisticated, rigorous, and meticulously documented analysis demonstrates that clientelism takes a surprising variety of forms-and that coercion and voter intimidation, rather than voluntary exchange and favors, can fundamentally characterize these relationships. This fascinating and compelling study redefines our understanding of clientelism, coercion, and class politics." -- Anna GrzymalaBusse, Stanford University