Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism: The Puzzle of Distributive Politics

Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism addresses major questions in distributive politics. Why is it acceptable for parties to try to win elections by promising to make certain groups of people better off, but unacceptable - and illegal - to pay people for their votes? Why do parties often lavish benefits on loyal voters, whose support they can count on anyway, rather than on responsive swing voters? Why is vote buying and machine politics common in today's developing democracies but a thing of the past in most of today's advanced democracies? This book develops a theory of broker-mediated distribution to answer these questions, testing the theory with research from four developing democracies, and reviews a rich secondary literature on countries in all world regions. The authors deploy normative theory to evaluate whether clientelism, pork-barrel politics, and other non-programmatic distributive strategies can be justified on the grounds that they promote efficiency, redistribution, or voter participation.

Author: Susan C. Stokes, Thad Dunning, Marcelo Nazareno
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 09/23/2013
Pages: 344
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.30lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 1.00d
ISBN: 9781107042209

About the Author
Stokes, Susan C.: - Susan Stokes is John S. Saden Professor of Political Science at Yale University and Director of the Yale Program on Democracy. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a past vice president of the American Political Science Association (APSA), and a past president of APSA's Comparative Politics Section. Her books and articles explore democratization and how democracy works in developing countries. They have been recognized with prizes from APSA, APSA's Comparative Democratization Section, and the Society for Comparative Research. Her research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Science Foundation, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the MacArthur Foundation, and Fulbright programs.Dunning, Thad: - Thad Dunning is Professor of Political Science at Yale University. He is also a research fellow at Yale's Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, and co-director, with Giovanni Maggi, of Yale's Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy. He studies comparative politics, political economy, and methodology. His first book, Crude Democracy: Natural Resource Wealth and Political Regimes (Cambridge, 2008), won the Best Book Award from the Comparative Democratization Section of APSA and the Gaddis Smith Prize for the best first book on an international topic by a member of the Yale faculty. Dunning has also written on a range of methodological topics; his second book, Natural Experiments in the Social Sciences: A Design-Based Approach (Cambridge, 2012), develops a framework for the discovery, analysis, and evaluation of strong research designs.Nazareno, Marcelo: - Marcelo Nazareno is Professor of Political Science at the National University of Córdoba and Professor of Methodology and Public Policy at the Catholic University of Córdoba. He holds a PhD in social science as well as advanced degrees in public administration and in history. He has been a visiting researcher at Yale University and the University of Chicago. His publications, in journals such as Desarrollo Económico and the Latin American Research Review, touch on the themes of the left in Latin America, clientelism and distributive politics, and fiscal federalism. He has made presentations on these topics at international conferences in Argentina, Brazil, the United States, and Spain.
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