Forms Of Clientelism Research Articles

Mainstream Parties’ Construction of Populist Discourse in Australia’s Temporary Migration Policy

Growing alarm has been expressed about populism in mainstream political parties, yet the vast majority of scholarship investigating populism has documented the role of radical right populist parties rather than that of mainstream parties. This article draws on non-essentialist understandings of populism—the idea that populism is a central aspect of democracy and not restricted to the realm of radical political parties and “populist” leaders—to examine how mainstream political leaders discursively articulate the antagonism between “the people” and the institutional order. We also examine how mainstream party leaders, who are likely to be deeply embedded in the institutional order, negotiate tensions between the institutionalized system and populist articulation. We study this in the Australian context, which is appropriate for examining populism in mainstream political parties given that far-right and far-left parties have gained much smaller shares of electoral support in Australia than elsewhere. Our findings indicate that mainstream party leaders discursively construct the idea of “the people” by homogenizing disparate social demands and claiming their right to represent the community as a whole. In doing so, these leaders must negotiate pressures from the institutionalized order in the form of clientelism and accountability. This article contributes insights on the reconciliation of contemporary populism with institutionalized settings and processes.

Who accepts electoral clientelism? The role of personality traits in Romania

ABSTRACT Personality traits have an impact on citizens’ political participation especially in relation to voting. However, we know little about how personality traits can influence people’s attitudes towards electoral clientelism. The latter is associated with voting in many societies and has been explained so far mainly through political, social and economic determinants. This article focuses on the psychological dimension and seeks to analyze how personality traits have an effect on citizens’acceptance of electoral clientelism. It distinguishes between three forms of clientelism: vote-buying, product provision and job promises. The statistical analysis uses the Big Five framework and individual-level data from an original survey conducted in Romania after the September 2020 local elections. The results show that only a small share of voters accept electoral clientelism.Conscientiousness, Extraversion and Agreeableness drive the acceptance of different forms of clientelism under specific circumstances.

A regional head election’s political corruption and new styles of clientelism

Intense competition in the regional head election (Pilkada) has implications for the increasing costs that candidates have to prepare to win the competition. The high cost in the regional head election makes many regional heads, when elected, commit political corruption and practices that are more adapted to the situation, namely the new styles of clientelism. This study aims to determine the shift in the relationship between political corruption and clientelism and to see new forms of clientelism. The approach used in this research was a literature study. Documents were selected using an application from the Publish or Perish database. The results of this study indicate that first, the power of money in politics in Indonesia creates a significant dependence on economic power, which influences a high level of political corruption. Second, there are two new styles of clientelism, including buying and selling votes and patronage in the bureaucracy. This paper concludes that the various modes of political corruption and new styles of clientelism that occur underline political vulnerabilities at the local level due to the broad elaboration of regional authority discretion.

The Janus faces of (anti-)corruption rhetoric in Greece

The article outlines the use of corruption rhetoric in Greek politics based on official reports and press publications in selected years and examines the functions it fulfils. In the beginning of the article, an overview of international research and its contextual background about corruption is provided. The absence of historical accounts in the (anti-) corruption literature is noted and an overview of factors that have been correlated by researchers with corruption is given, such as degree of democracy, (de)centralization of the political system, media scandalization, etc. The article briefly presents the approach of Greek analysts to the topic. Issues concerning old and new forms of clientelism, which held the most interest for Greek academics, are analysed. Also, the discourse analysis carried out and its findings is portrayed. The analysis reveals that politicians’ corruption rhetoric operates primarily as a strategy that is capable of undermining the morale of the main political opponent(s) and occasionally as a method of ensuring electoral supremacy. The rather unhelpful attempts of the Greek governments to improve the position of the country in the anticorruption universe by introducing successive legislation, new bodies and institutions to control corruption, while disregarding the fact that the main efforts should be focused on Greece’s market image are illustrated. A positive change in the country’s image in the market came incidentally during the last few years of the Greek economic crisis thanks to neoliberal economic policies under the tutelage of foreign lenders.

The politics of promoting social cash transfers in Uganda: The potential and pitfalls of “thinking and working politically”

AbstractMotivationSocial cash transfer programmes (SCTs) have spread rapidly in sub‐Saharan Africa during the last decade. However, there is little consensus on how this has happened, particularly in terms of the relative roles of international development agencies and national‐level political factors.Uganda is one of several countries to have adopted cash transfers since 2010 and can offer important insights into how this process has unfolded.PurposeTheoretical advances suggest that transnational policy transfer is most effective when international actors are able to align their proposals with domestic political dynamics. This article examines how the adoption of a “thinking and working politically” approach enabled donors to shape the uptake of SCTs in Uganda. It investigates what happens when a “going with the grain” approach is deployed in a context where domestic political dynamics are moving further away from the progressive forms of politics that proponents of social protection in Africa have often heralded.Approach and methodsThe article is based on an in‐depth qualitative case study of the promotion of SCTs in Uganda. Over 35 key informant interviews were undertaken with all key stakeholders, particularly between 2014–2016 after the government of Uganda announced a scaling‐up of SCTs. The triangulation of these accounts within a rigorous process‐tracing methodology enables us to link key turning points in this process to donor strategies and Uganda’s changing political settlement.FindingsDonor efforts to promote SCTs in Uganda prospered when a shift was made from a technocratic to a more politically informed approach in the late 2000s. By employing strategies from the new “thinking and working politically” agenda, an alignment was eventually achieved between SCTs and Uganda’s shifting political settlement, including the president’s increased vulnerability to popular pressures and the commercialization of patron–client politics. However, cash transfers have been adopted primarily as a form of clientelism rather than as a strategy for promoting either significant levels of poverty reduction or an improved social contract.Policy implicationsThe findings suggest that the “thinking and working politically” agenda carries significant risks when applied in contexts such as Uganda, where the political conditions for development are deteriorating.

Inoculation of Safety in Healthcare

The purpose of this paper is to analyse - through a prism of informal institutions - the role and importance of security in healthcare and the manner in which healthcare sector copes with security threats in postmodern society. We note that bad informal institutions are differently reflected in Slovenia. In the forefront are the problems of systemic corruption, various forms of clientelism and nepotism. This is (in)directly reflected in the (lack of) quality of Slovenian healthcare system. Inadequate public procurement system and conflicts of interest in healthcare sector are causing inferior quality of the healthcare system, while informal institutions in politics and economics are weakening Slovenian economy, consequently affecting the funding of Slovenian healthcare system which is also undermined by the financial crisis. Additionally, globalisation, which has a (negative) impact on human health, has caused the importation of improper business practices into healthcare system. It is therefore necessary to develop a preventive action that will inoculate the idea of a safe country for the benefit of people and not for the benefit of bad informal networks.

Why Political Competition Can Increase Patronage

Patronage is important in developing countries, but its relationship to political competition has received little attention. Major literatures generate opposing predictions. In the good governance and democracy literatures, robust political competition is the antidote to patronage. But for scholars studying the process of democratization, competitive politics is associated with heightened social tensions and instability. Using data from an original survey covering 88% of local governments in Ghana, I show that political competition can increase patronage: where local elections are closely fought by the two main parties, local governments provide significantly more public sector jobs. I use qualitative data from 9 months of fieldwork to show the causal channel. I find a bottom-up phenomenon in which pressures for patronage come from parties’ own volunteers. Volunteers actively use their parties’ vulnerability in competitive elections to extract rewards. I locate the root of volunteers’ power in the nature of the party system, and I demonstrate that for 19 African countries, variation in party system strength is linked to certain forms of clientelism. These findings challenge assumptions that competitive politics will reduce patronage, as well as assumptions that a decline in one form of clientelism means a decline in all forms of clientelism.

Poor People's Beliefs and the Dynamics of Clientelism

Political science literature on clientelism has tended to focus on vote-buying, viewed primarily from the perspective of parties/brokers. The motives that drive clients to engage in clientelism and the different forms of clientelism that result remain relatively unexplored. This paper proposes a formal model of clientelism that focuses primarily on the client’s side, setting clientelism against the possibility of supporting a redistributive platform and incorporating insights from social psychology theories. We consider two key perceptions: political efficacy and inequality legitimation, and make them endogenous. In the model, perceptions of inefficacy and the legitimacy of inequality reinforce each other leading to multiple steady states. One of these resembles a “traditional” form of clientelism with disempowered clients that legitimize social inequalities. Community connectivity breaks this reinforcement mechanism and leads to a unique steady state, where clientelism and programmatic redistribution coexist, that resembles “modern” clientelism characterized by vote-buying.

Öffentliche Staatsgewalt?

It was only when domination was no longer seen as legitimising private appropriation that “corruption” and “political scandal” became topics of political debate. The constitution of the modern (bourgeois) state separated the competition for power from the competition for profit or for means of living. Only then became the concept of “public service” a structural element of the political system. Today we observe new forms of clientelism, i.e. the furthering of one’s interests through personal connections, a new culture of privileges for the political class and systemic corruption in many branches of the state apparatus. These developments have been furthered by the dynamics of modern mass parties, especially their alimentation through the state, by dense administrative regulation and by the transformation of the political culture in post-bourgeois nation-states.