Research
Dissertation Project
This project analyzes the effect of weak party systems on the nature of clientelism. I argue that when political parties lack the capacity to select and monitor party brokers, national legislators will use mayors as brokers in order to capture local voter networks. I use a formal model in order to predict when mayors will send the signal that they use clientelism for secure voter networks and when they will be reliable brokers for national legislators. I test this model in the context of Colombia. I use a Bayesian mixed-membership model in order to estimate the prevalence of clientelism at the municipal level. I then conduct a large-N analysis of municipalities on how many club goods projects are contracted and the discretionary transfers received. Finally, I use qualitative data from interviews conducted with mayors, legislators, and local bureaucrats from July-December 2018.
Measuring Local-Level Clientelism: A Bayesian Mixed-Membership Approach
Scholars of distributive politics often discuss the importance of the use of clientelism. However, since clientelist exchanges occur “under the table”, we lack strong observational data to estimate the actual prevalence of clientelism. The current solution is to use survey experiments designed to elicit sensitive information in order to create population-level estimates.This measurement strategy, however, does not permit us to estimate within-country variation in the use of clientelism. In order to address this challenge, I propose estimating local-level clientelism using a Bayesian Mixed-Membership model. Using data from Colombia on the employees who are employed as temporary teachers, I model whether the teachers are hired based on their meritocratic qualifications or to fulfill political aims, Specifically, I consider the type of vacancy the teacher fills, the level of education the teacher has, whether their education aligns with what they are teaching, where the school is located within the municipality, how the teacher is paid, and any bonuses received. I use these municipal hiring patterns to estimate the presence of clientelism at the municipal level. These estimates align with survey questions from the same time period.
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Who Gets the Goods: Locally Targeted
Goods Provision in Weak Party Systems
How do politicians strategically allocate funds in the context of weak political parties? In much of the literature on clientelism, political parties play an instrumental role in selecting reliable brokers who can help translate goods into votes. However, in many democracies, political parties lack the internal capacity to build and maintain clientelist networks. When parties cannot oversee clientelist machines, national politicians will use their personal relationships with local politicians to determine where to provide local goods, like pork or club goods. I argue that regardless of the political party in office, national politicians are more likely to target municipalities where mayors have clientelist networks in place. I test this argument in Colombia. I generate original estimates of municipal-level clientelism using a a Bayesian Mixed-Membership Model. I find that municipalities with higher levels of clientelism are likely to receive more local benefits in the form of development projects.
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You Get What You Need? The Role of Credit Attribution in the Underprovision of Local Goods
The unequal distribution of local public goods has long been explained using partisan political networks. However, in many developing democracies, political parties lack the capacity to coordinate partisan redistribution. I argue that in weak party environments, concerns about credit hijacking will influence distributive strategies. I use a signaling model to isolate the relationship between a national politician with access to discretionary funds and a mayor. While ambitious mayors, aspiring for higher level office, are more likely to attribute credit to national politicians, national politicians can rarely identify these mayors. Thus, national politicians will moderate their use of targeted benefits to maximize their likelihood of receiving credit for providing goods. I explore these theoretical results using the case of Colombia.
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Additional Research
Who Gets Credit? Citizen Responses to Local Public Goods
In decentralized systems, citizens struggle to identify which level of government provides local goods. This problem is particularly salient in weakly institutionalized party environments, where politicians at different levels of government are less likely to benefit from partisan coattail effects. In this paper, I ask how citizens attribute credit for local public goods. I argue that citizens have a strong bias towards attributing credit to local politicians. As a result, citizens will respond differently to credit claiming behavior by local and national politicians. Local politicians experience a ceiling effect where credit claiming has no effect on how citizens attribute credit. However, national politicians have no such ceiling and can claim credit to increase the likelihood that citizens will attribute credit to them. As a result, both political actors can receive credit for the same local goods. I test and support these theoretical predictions using a vignette survey experiment in Colombia.
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Testing the Effects of Nationally Mandated Participatory Reforms
Coauthored with Stephanie McNulty, Franklin and Marshall College
Do participatory governance reform lead to increased citizen participation, improved accountability, and reduced clientelism? As participatory democratic institutions emerge around the world, we still know too little about their potential to impact democracy and governance in the developing world. This article explores these issues though the use of an original database of one hundred and twenty five countries in the developing world, which captures eighteen cases of nationally mandated participatory reforms passed and implemented between 1985 and 2015. The analysis suggests that nationally mandated participatory reforms do engage citizens more effectively in public-policy decision-making processes and can, especially in weakly decentralized environments, improve accountability. However, they do not curb clientelism, rather, they open up new venues for particularistic spending in subnational governments. Importantly, as the degree of decentralization increases, positive effects on participation and accountability get smaller and smaller. This suggests that these venues for participation may be most important in weakly decentralized contexts, where few additional means for effective participation exist in local and regional governments. In highly decentralized contexts, alternative means for reducing clientelism, increasing accountability, and even engaging citizens in decision-making will probably be more effective.