Brokering Bureaucrats: How Bureaucrats and Civil Society Facilitate Clientelism Where Parties are Weak

Cornell, Agnes; Grimes, Marcia

doi:10.1177/00104140221115171

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 74 publications

(93 reference statements)

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In addition, social organizations have higher levels of organizational network structures, which allow them to reach a broader range of voters. Social organizations undertake the responsibility of delivering benefits to target constituencies and better monitoring citizens' voting behaviors (Holland and Palmer-Rubin 2015;Cornell and Grimes 2022).…”

Section: Theoretical Background and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Religious Ideology and Clientelist Linkage in the Middle East and North Africa

Hu,

Wang,

Zhang

2024

Religions

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The literature on clientelism, the informal exchange of benefits for political support, has proliferated over the last three decades. However, the existing literature largely ignores the role of religion in shaping clientelism in contemporary politics. In particular, few attempts have been made to explore the relationship between religious ideology and clientelism at the party level: How does political parties’ religious ideology impact their clientelist linkages with citizens? This study uses cross-national data of parties in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) from the V-Party database (1970–2019) to answer this question. Our findings reveal that religious parties are more clientelist than secular parties in the MENA. Particularly, parties’ ties with social organizations mediate the relationship between religious ideology and clientelism. This study extends the literature on the impact of religion on informal political institutions by focusing on the ideology and linkage strategy of political parties in the MENA.

show abstract

Section: Theoretical Background and Hypothesesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Religious Ideology and Clientelist Linkage in the Middle East and North Africa

Hu,

Wang,

Zhang

2024

Religions

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Who Gets Hired? Political Patronage and Bureaucratic Favoritism

HASSAN,

LARREGUY,

RUSSELL

2024

Am Polit Sci Rev

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Most research on biased public sector hiring highlights local politicians’ incentives to distribute government positions to partisan supporters. Other studies instead point to the role of bureaucratic managers in allocating government jobs to close contacts. We jointly consider the relative importance of each source of biased hiring as an allocation problem between managers and politicians who have different preferences regarding public sector hiring and different abilities to realize those preferences. We develop a theoretical model of each actor’s relative leverage and relative preferences for different types of public sector positions. We empirically examine our theory using the universe of payroll data in Kenyan local governments from 2004 to 2013. We find evidence of both patronage and bureaucratic favoritism, but with different types of bias concentrated in different types of government jobs, as our theory predicts. Our results highlight the inadequacy of examining political patronage alone without incorporating the preferences and leverage of the bureaucratic managers who are intricately involved in hiring processes.

show abstract

Brokering Bureaucrats: How Bureaucrats and Civil Society Facilitate Clientelism Where Parties are Weak

Cornell

Grimes

2022

Comparative Political Studies

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Clientelism, the exchange of selective rewards for votes, is fraught with commitment problems and questions remain regarding how it occurs in settings lacking strong parties. In such settings, we argue, bureaucrats can act as brokers using their own networks. Bureaucrats can use their discretionary power to cultivate reciprocal relations with voters and leverage this political capital in negotiations with politicians to secure career advancements. As brokering requires networks, we hypothesize that bureaucrats with connections to civil society are more likely to exhibit brokering behavior, and especially in localities with stronger civil society. Original survey data of bureaucrats ( N=1300) in a context of weak parties, Peru’s 25 regions plus the city of Lima, show that bureaucrats with connections to civil society are more likely to exhibit brokering behavior. Political and party connections are weaker predictors of brokering. The paper thus shows how locally connected bureaucrats may aid in coordinating clientelism.

show abstract

Brokering Bureaucrats: How Bureaucrats and Civil Society Facilitate Clientelism Where Parties are Weak

Cited by 3 publications

References 74 publications

Religious Ideology and Clientelist Linkage in the Middle East and North Africa

Religious Ideology and Clientelist Linkage in the Middle East and North Africa

Who Gets Hired? Political Patronage and Bureaucratic Favoritism

Brokering Bureaucrats: How Bureaucrats and Civil Society Facilitate Clientelism Where Parties are Weak

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About