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Patronage, Democracy, and the Public Sector: Estimating the Size and Structure of Patronage Networks

by Maria Victoria Murillo (Political Science)

Recent literature on Latin American political parties has emphasized their increasing reliance on public resources for both organizational and electoral reasons. The exchange of employment for political support is defined as patronage and its study is the main objective of this research. Understanding the size and structure of patronage networks is a crucial endeavor for newly democratized countries, where increasing numbers of citizens rely on the reelection of incumbent patrons for their material survival. The extant literature focuses on explaining how politicians and voters enforce their unwritten contract, delivering the promised benefits (patrons) and casting the promised votes (clients). This literature, however, neglects two crucial questions: (i) how many patrons and clients are involved in these networks; and (ii) what sub-groups are most actively recruited and why. The former question inquires on the size of patronage networks while the latter inquires as to its structure. By answering these two questions, this study moves beyond the analysis of the individual exchange between patrons and clients.

To measure patronage networks this research will implement a new survey methodology using indirect questions of the form Â"how many XÂ's do you knowÂ" in order to estimate the size of hard-to-count populations and to uncover social structure in individual level data. The proposed surveys will be conducted in metropolitan and peripheral regions of Argentina and Chile, capturing data to study four different types of patronage networks.