Buying Power: Electoral Strategy before the Secret Vote

Abstract

Research on clientelism emphasizes the use of brokers to mobilize voters. To utilize these agents efficiently, politicians must learn about brokers’ relative abilities and allocate scarce resources accordingly. Drawing upon a hand-coded dataset based on the archives of Gustavo Capanema, a powerful mid-twentieth-century congressman from Minas Gerais, Brazil, this paper offers the first direct evidence of such learning dynamics. The analysis concentrates on Brazil’s pre-secret ballot era, a time when measuring broker performance was particularly straightforward. Consistent with theories of political learning, the data demonstrate that resource flows to local machines were contingent on the deviation between actual and expected votes received in previous elections. Moreover, given politicians’ ability to discern mobilization capacity, payments to brokers were highly effective in bringing out the vote.

Pandemics and Political Development: The Electoral Legacy of the Black Death in Germany

“…Practices such as clientelism and vote brokerage are held to be especially effective in contexts in which landed elites employ a large segment of the labor force (Anderson, Francois and Kotwal, 2015;Scott, 1972;Stokes, Dunning, Nazareno and Brusco, 2013). Consequently, in agrarian settings with dominant landowners, voters are often induced to vote for the politicians that elites prefer, typically conservative politicians inclined to defend the extant property rights regime (Baland and Robinson, 2008;Gingerich, 2020;Gingerich and Medeiros, 2020;Mares, 2015). Our contribution to this literature is to endogenize the sources of landed elite power in a long-term historical perspective.…”

Why Do Clientelist Brokers Go Rogue? Parties, Politicians, and Intermediaries in Mexico

“…Politicians and parties require a reliable base of voters who will arrive at the polling stations on election day and mark their ballots correctly. Over time, parties discover which brokers deliver their voters and which do not, and this is the base of a broker’s reputation (Interview #18, 1, consistent with Gingerich 2020). (In online appendix 3 we report the complete list of interviewees, with their gender, party, mentions of cheating, type of actor, and the day and place of the interview.…”

“…Most clientelist intermediaries do not engage in one-shot exchanges with politicians; rather, politicians invest time, energy, and resources in building and maintaining networks of brokers and voters in scores of neighborhoods to maintain a stable base of votes. Over time, politicians learn which broker can and cannot deliver votes reliably (Gingerich 2020). Brokers often wish to stay with “their” politician or party because they can rely on regular access to government goods and the programs that they need to keep their voters from switching to other brokers, without the costs of searching out new patrons (Auyero 2000; González-Ocantos and Oliveros 2019).…”

Pandemics and Political Development: The Electoral Legacy of the Black Death in Germany

“…Practices such as clientelism and vote brokerage are held to be especially eective in contexts in which landed elites employ a large segment of the labor force (Anderson, Francois and Kotwal, 2015;Scott, 1972;Stokes, Dunning, Nazareno and Brusco, 2013). Consequently, in agrarian settings with dominant landowners, voters are often induced to vote for the politi-cians that elites prefer, typically conservative politicians inclined to defend the extant property rights regime (Baland and Robinson, 2008;Gingerich, 2020;Gingerich and Medeiros, 2020;Mares, 2015). Our contribution to this literature is to endogenize the sources of landed elite power in a long-term historical perspective.…”