That title could be the title of a book, or a multi-volume collection. This is a big topic. The purpose here will be more modest than the title implies. I want to sketch the basic logic of how electoral systems can generate incentives for “clientelism.” I responded already to an excellent question in the thread on proposed electoral reform in Malta. In the editorial that I quoted in part, it is claimed that the use of the single transferable vote (STV) in Malta has led to clientelistic behavior by which politicians “rely on dishing out favours to secure their seats.” The money quote on why the electoral system promotes this behavior would be the following:
The STV system, while aiming to provide representation to diverse political views, has led to fierce competition among candidates from the same party within a single district. This unhealthy competition often results in politicians prioritising convincing voters not to vote for their internal rivals rather than engaging with people from opposing parties.
Christopher asked, “Is there a particular tendency towards clientelism in STV and SNTV1 that is not present in open list PR?” This is a great question. I answered it in that comment thread, but I felt it deserved its own dedicated planting, as well as further elaboration on the broader issue.
First, let’s consider a working definition of clientelism. It is, very broadly, the exchange of favors for political support. Not mere campaign promises, and not routine casework (like a legislator helping a constituent navigate the bureaucracy). But actual delivery of favors as a quid-pro-quo for the vote. It is most prevalent when vote choices can actually be observed, but such monitoring is not required. Parties or candidates can have other means of knowing which voters are likely to be loyal, and direct favors to them without actually validating how they voted. (They typically can validate that they voted, and have other good information on their political allegiances.)
Clientelism is also not “pork barrel” politics. “Pork” is local public goods, such as a road or train station or a military base (etc.) being located in a constituency as a reward for its voters being politically loyal to the party or legislator. Pork is not mainly directed at specific voters or narrow groups of voters. These two concepts can shade into one another, however, without a sharp dividing line between them. Nonetheless, they are conceptually distinct.
The most pernicious forms of clientelism are those that involve the subversion of public services. Suppose there is some entitlement program such that anyone who meets program criteria should get it (a health or childcare benefit or an electrical grid connection to your house, for example). Yet in practice, only those who prove their political loyalty actually get the benefit. If the local clientelistic “boss” does not vouch for you, too bad. No service for you. The “boss” could be a local party worker, a government official who is part of the clientelistic network (and a patronage appointee rather than one hired principally on merit), or even our legislator.
There are other, more “petty,” forms of clientelism, such as legislators showing up to weddings and funerals and bringing gifts as a means to cement political loyalties. These practices cost money, which may be raised through unregulated donations from business or via outright corruption,2 although they may also be financed through more legitimate campaign contributions. But they do not undermine public services like the first kind I mentioned. Basically, clientelism takes many forms, and some may be very harmful to effective governance and some not so much.
There are also practices to cultivate a “personal vote”3 that are not clientelism at all. Candidates emphasizing how their own attributes–like being locally based, being of a certain occupation or other experience, etc.–will make them better representatives than their competitors are not clientelism because nothing of intrinsic value is being exchanged.4
Having laid out these broad definitions and boundaries of the concept, let’s turn to what the electoral system may have to do with it. Back to Christopher’s question–is there a particular tendency towards clientelism in STV and SNTV that is not present in open list PR? On theoretical grounds, the answer to the question is yes.
An inability, given electoral rules, of parties to maximize their seats without engaging in vote management is what makes it critical to give voters a reason to favor one candidate of the party over another. Clientelism is one–but only one–means of managing the vote, by which here I mainly mean attempting to ensure each candidate the party seeks to elect has the personal vote totals needed to earn a seat. Any number of personal vote-enhancing tactics or attributes might work, but the advantage (to the party) of using clientelistic practices is that it gives voters a clearer incentive to vote for the “correct” candidate because that is the individual who got you, the voter, the favors.5 (Vote management also may take place at the candidate selection stage,6 but I will mostly leave that aside here.)
The imperative to engage in vote management is most acute under SNTV, somewhat less under STV, and theoretically a non-factor under OLPR. With SNTV, by definition the winners are the candidates with the M highest individual vote totals in the district, where M is the magnitude of the district (the number elected from it). Because there is only a single vote and it does not transfer (no ranked preferences) or pool (no party-level aggregation before seats are assigned), the party can win its target number of seats only by having that number of candidates within the top M. If it has too many candidates, or too many votes concentrated on its most popular candidate, it may fail to elect the number it is seeking to elect, with other candidates falling out of the top M. With STV, the vote transferring should limit this problem, but it does not necessarily eliminate it. If a party has some of the candidates it is hoping to elect get eliminated early in the count, the party will fail to elect all that they could have if only those candidates had stayed in the count long enough to pick up transferred preferences from more popular co-partisans or from eliminated candidates of their own or other parties. This is especially a problem if voters load a lot of their first preferences on one candidate (similar to one of the key problems in SNTV), and if they do not rank all available candidates of the same party before ranking candidates of other parties. (Failure to keep preferences within the party is known as “vote leakage.”)
Why, then, is the vote-management imperative that may drive clientelism a non-factor under open lists, at least theoretically? Because vote pooling at party-list level means the party won’t displace seats to another party by failing to have an optimal distribution of votes among its candidates. A list wins some number of seats, which we will denote as s, based on its collective vote total. It does not matter if some of the party’s s candidates with the top individual vote totals do not place in the district’s top M overall. It will always elect s, the number its pooled vote total entitled it to, as long as it has at least that many candidates on the list.
There can be other reasons why the party might care which candidates win, however, which means there can still be party-driven clientelistic strategies, or other vote-management practices, under OLPR. That is, while parties have incentive to nominate a full list of candidates to collect votes that pool for seat-maximization, maybe they really want to ensure the election of some specific candidates.7 So the clientelistic way to do this is give them access to resources to ensure their own election. (Again, there may be ways to promote a division of the vote that is optimal from the party’s perspective without using clientelism.)
That is the theory.8 When we turn to empirics, it gets murkier.
An important point here is that clientelism usually is not caused by the electoral system. Clientelism can occur under any electoral system, and in authoritarian as well as democratic systems. It has many roots aside from institutions.9 It just takes different forms under different institutions. In theory, closed-list PR should be the electoral system least conducive to clientelism. CLPR should encourage campaigns centered around policy and programmatic offerings to voters, because voters select the party as a whole and thus candidates are not pitted against one another in their quest for a seat. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that parties as a whole can engage in clientelism. There are closed-list systems that are famous for it, such as Argentina10 and Venezuela (prior to the adoption of MMP in 1993, but clientelism certainly continued afterwards). This is a different form of clientelism, in that it is obviously not being used as a strategy to divide the vote within a party, as it would be under SNTV, STV, or potentially OLPR. But if you are a citizen who is unable to get a public service without having proven you have the “correct” political allegiance, you do not really care how the electoral system might be, or might not be, responsible for your predicament.
Returning to the prevalence of clientelism under systems with intra-party competition, we might note that Brazilian politics is clientelistic under OLPR, but Finnish politics is individualistic without being clientelistic despite also using OLPR. Maltese politics is clientelistic under STV, Irish much less so. (Ireland is famous for the localism of its politics and for “friends and family” voting, but I don’t think of that system as clientelistic–but see exchange with Ken in the comments.) Taiwan probably had less clientelism than Japan9 under SNTV and both surely had far less than Colombia, which used a system that was basically SNTV prior to 2003.
Malta, as we were discussing at the other planting, has clientelism with STV despite a very party-oriented electorate. That suggests it is probably not vote-management, as I defined it above, that is driving the clientelism. So maybe STV is not driving it, either, but I do not know enough about Maltese politics to make such a judgment. It would be important to nail down the logic of clientelism in Malta before recommending an electoral reform. If it is more party-level clientelism, then closed-list PR will not help. The quote from the editorial (see above or the earlier post) certainly implies it is candidate-based, however.11 [This footnote is actually no. 12 in list below.]
In sum, clientelism is the exchange of favors to individual voters or small groups of people in return for political allegiance, including votes. Such practices should be kept distinct from other means of campaigning on benefits other than those derived from programmatic policies, such as “pork” and are distinct from the personal vote. However, in systems that promote a personal vote via intra-party competition, parties may engage in various tactics of vote-management in order to maximize seats. Vote management may involve clientelism, although it does not inevitably do so. Clientelism can occur under any electoral system, but systems that promote vote management can be expected to encourage clientelism to a greater degree than other systems, all else equal. Open-list PR, because it does not usually tie party seat maximization to vote management, should not promote clientelism to the same substantial degree as SNTV does. STV should fall closer to SNTV than to OLPR in its clientelistic tendencies. Other factors matter; it would be a big mistake to think that the electoral system determines whether or not there is clientelism, but it may encourage it to take certain forms or be worse, in a given context, than would be the case with a different electoral system.
Footnotes. [Sometimes the numbering of these by Word Press goes awry.]
- Single non-transferable vote. ↩︎
- Perhaps because I mentioned it, I also have to define corruption. I hesitate to do so, but it is important to note that something is not corrupt just because it looks bad, and pork barrel is not per se corruption. A practice is corrupt if it involves illegal use of public resources, such as providing services only with direct payment (bribes), awarding public contracts to political supporters outside of regular bidding processes, or raising campaign funds illegally. ↩︎
- A personal vote is that portion of a candidate’s vote that derives from his or her attributes or experience, as distinct from votes earned via the candidate’s party label. The classic definition is from Cain, Ferejohn, and Fiorina (1987). ↩︎
- Engaging in casework, providing clientelism, and having a reputation for delivering pork all may be ways to build a personal vote. But a personal vote need not be built on any of these strategies. It could be as simple as voters liking the candidate who is of their ethnic group, resides in their area, is a celebrity (i.e., famous before entering politics), or whose personal integrity they admire. ↩︎
- Incentives can be aligned in other ways, such as through party personnel practices. Examples include assigning legislators who will serve as conduits of regulatory and other favors on behalf of particular business interests to specific legislative (or internal party) committees where they can credibly claim to have lobbied their party or the government on behalf of the interest. This is not necessarily clientelism (or pork), but it may be, and certainly was in Japan under SNTV. ↩︎
- For instance, by nominating/endorsing only as many candidates as the party perceives as optimal in a system without party-level vote pooling (like SNTV), or by ensuring a set of candidates with an appropriate mix of personal vote-earning attributes that will appeal to sub-constituencies within the district. ↩︎
- This imperative becomes even greater if the list is comprised of an alliance of two or more parties. In that case, the component parties obviously are not indifferent as to which specific candidates win the seats the list obtains. This provides a strong SNTV-style dynamic to the competition. Alliance lists are common in the open-list systems of Brazil, Chile, and Finland. Chapter 14 of Votes from Seats deals extensively with this matter. Even a single party may have a collective interest in ensuring some specific candidates on its list get elected, perhaps for the “party personnel” reasons mentioned in an earlier footnote (i.e., wanting personnel with certain experience to serve as policy specialists on behalf of key constituencies). ↩︎
- These theoretical points are advanced in more detail in chapters 13 and 14 of Votes from Seats, and also in my article with Bergman and Watt. Both also are empirical works, but the outcome of interest is the number of party-endorsed candidates and their vote shares, not clientelism or personal-vote earning strategies. On the theory, see also Carey and Shugart (1995). ↩︎
- The most obvious roots would be economic, particularly uneven development. Richer and less unequal countries undoubtedly have less clientelism–at least of the “pernicious” forms. State capacity is also a big one, but the arrows can point both ways. Low state capacity creates more demand for clientelism to fill in gaps in public services, but clientelism creates vested political interests against building state agencies empowered to deliver services to the broader public without the quid-pro-quo. Ethnically divided societies also tend to be especially conductive to clientelistic strategies, mostly because ethnic affinity provides a “shortcut” to determining which parties or candidates are credible as service-providers to your group (see Chandra 2004). There are vast literatures on these points, which I will not attempt to review or synthesize here. ↩︎
- On Argentina, and for an excellent overview of how clientelism works generally, see Auyero (2000). ↩︎
- [Footnote marker no. 9, re Japan.] Most of the clientelism in Japan was of the more “petty” kind I referred to above. Campaigns were famously expensive and this fueled corruption. Personal vote and pork barrel were prevalent, as well, but not (as far as I know) the kind of subversion of public services that I think of as the most pernicious manifestations of clientelism. ↩︎
- I struggle to some degree with understanding the full logic of this claim regarding Malta, however. With transferable votes, the reason for vote-management should be mainly driven by concerns of “vote leakage” whereby transfers do not stay within the party of the first-preference candidate. However, in Malta there is hardly any leakage; few votes transfer from one party to another (see the source cited in the post on Malta). In this context, personal-vote practices, whether clientelistic or otherwise, are not needed to maximize seats. It should be, in practice, more like what I said about open lists. I am certainly in no position to resolve this puzzle. ↩︎