Cultivating Clients: Reputation, Responsiveness, and Ethnic Indifference in India's Slums

Abstract

Studies of clientelism overwhelmingly focus on how brokers target voters with top‐down benefits during elections. Yet brokers also receive requests from voters for assistance between elections, initiating the processes through which they cultivate clients. Why are brokers responsive to the requests of some voters and not others? We provide the first study of broker preferences when evaluating client appeals. Theories emphasizing brokers as vote monitors anticipate they will prefer co‐partisans and coethnics, whose reciprocity they can best verify. Theories emphasizing brokers as vote mobilizers anticipate they will prefer residents who will maximize their reputations for efficacy. We test these expectations through a conjoint experiment with 629 Indian slum leaders, ethnographic fieldwork, and a survey of 2,199 slum residents. We find evidence of reputational considerations shaping broker responsiveness. We find mixed support for monitoring concerns, highlighted by an absence of the strong ethnic favoritism assumed to dominate distributive politics in many developing countries.

Iteration in Mixed-Methods Research Designs Combining Experiments and Fieldwork,

“…An example that uses ethnographic methods for purposes of strengthening the design of a conjoint experiment is Auerbach and Thachil (2020), who conducted research on slum leaders in India. To create realistic vignettes, they use ethnographic fieldwork to define accurate experimental attributes (Auerbach and Thachil 2020: 476–477). The use of ethnography results in a compelling research design with realistic treatments.…”

“…Nevertheless, critics argue that randomization has limits, and that experiments typically lack generalizability and are often unrealistic. A nascent body of literature highlights the advantages of using qualitative tools to refine experiments in the design phase as a tool to overcome these limitations (Auerbach and Thachil 2020;Beach and Littvay 2020;Dunning 2008Dunning , 2012Dunning and Harrison 2010;Seawright 2016Seawright , 2021Thachil 2018).…”

Patronage vs. ideology in Indian politics

“…Yet there are some reasons to be cautious about alternative explanations of voting based on performance as a key driver of the vote. First, much of the research in support of efficacy has been conducted at the lowest levels of government in India, where partisanship may be more muted, officials live among their constituents and monitoring of their efforts and related outcomes is thus possible (Auerbach & Thachil, 2020;Dunning & Nilekani, 2013). Research set in urban areas, particularly among slum populations, might also perhaps overemphasise the extent to which public goods distribution is transactional and easily monitored.…”

“…Yet scholars have been wary of separating distributive and electoral politics entirely. Rather, many view Indian citizens as primarily voting on the basis of performance, especially in the delivery of goods and services, whether by parties, by candidates, or by brokers (Auerbach & Thachil, 2020;Bussell, 2018). This might be an eminently reasonable proposition, and indeed one deeply embedded in normative theories of electoral democracy.…”

Who Gets Credit? Citizen Responses to Local Public Goods

“…Most existing theories of how credit attribution can help increase political accountability focus on political parties. Parties can play a variety of roles, including advertising what the political party has accomplished to help citizens assign credit across levels of government (Ames 1994; Auerbach and Thachil 2020; Ribeiro and Borges 2020). For national politicians, providing local public goods to copartisans can help foster cooperation, improve service delivery, and shape voter expectations (Bohlken 2018; Schneider 2020).…”