The Organizational Foundations of Democratic Accountability: Organizational Form and the Choice of Electoral Linkage Strategy

Abstract

In democratic elections, political parties and/or individual candidates offer citizens some mix of policy promises, material benefits, and symbolic cues, in exchange for which they hope to secure votes, labor, campaign contributions, etc. Define such exchange relations as democratic linkages, and define a political party’s chosen mix of exchange mechanisms as its linkage strategy. This paper’s central theoretical claim is that a political party’s organizational form will influence its ability to mitigate the distinct ‘contracting’ problems which accompany clientelist as opposed to programmatic linkage strategies. We operationalize and test our expectations as to the relationship between organizational form and linkage strategy with a newly emerging dataset on patterns of party organization and democratic accountability in 88 countries. On the whole, centralized organizations with ‘non-formalized’ local networks and financing practices are well-suited to the maintenance of clientelist contracts. In contrast, programmatic appeals tend to be best supported by decentralized organizations with extensive formal infrastructure, although the consequences of decentralization for programmatic effectiveness vary according to a party’s size.