Particularistic Benefits Research Articles

Populism and policy capacity: Evidence from an opposition municipality in Istanbul

AbstractDespite achievements in its conceptual rigor, policy capacity still represents a relatively depoliticized concept that fails to sufficiently consider the ways in which politics plays a role in its creation, mobilization, or decay. This article seeks to contribute to this debate by investigating the impact of populism on policy capacity, the type of policy capacity challenges posed and how they are related to populist policy design. Based on a case study of a municipality in Istanbul the article shows how populist politics and national populist policy design erode long‐term municipal policy capacity by enabling the (ab)use of the rule of law, loss of expertise, exhaustion of critical assets such as urban land and financial resources, and erosion of public citizenship due to growing expectations in the form of particularistic benefits. Declining policy capacity in turn leads to a shift in municipal policy priorities.

After a Storm Come Votes: Identifying the Effects of Disaster Relief on Electoral Outcomes

The retrospective voting theory suggests that citizens vote for governing parties in response to distributive benefits. Knowing this, governments may reward voters by providing particularistic benefits—i.e., pork—prior to elections. Previous studies, however, do not account for the endogeneity. We address this problem by focusing on disaster relief and exploiting exogeneity of disaster. In particular, by using maximum hourly rainfall as an instrumental variable for disaster relief, we analyze the causal effect of disaster relief on incumbent’s electoral outcomes. Our analyses of Japanese data in the past few decades indicate that disaster relief increased governing parties’ vote share. Specifically, when the disaster relief per capita increases from zero to its mean, the predicted value of the governing parties’ vote share increases by 2.8 and 5.4% points in the lower and upper chambers, respectively. The finding is consistent with retrospective voting behavior. Moreover, our results imply that the incumbent’s electoral gain is brought about by persuading voters from oppositions to governing parties rather than by mobilizing supporters of governing parties.

What Explains Voter Preferences in Transitional Tunisia? The Role of Particularistic Benefits

ABSTRACT What explains electoral support for Islamist parties? Existing literature assesses the role of programmatic appeals, in the form of religious ideology and economic programs, but lacks the data needed to test the role of particularistic benefits in shaping voter choice. Drawing on an original survey of 1,202 Tunisians conducted in 2012, I test the role of programmatic and particularistic benefits in explaining voter choice in Tunisia’s 2011 Constituent Assembly and 2014 parliamentary elections. I argue that, due to its greater party organizational capacity, Ennahda provided more constituency service than other parties and was more successful in attracting new supporters by 2012 as a result. In 2011, Ennahda voters were more religious and economically marginalized than non-Islamist voters. Yet by 2012, Ennahda developed a voter base drawn both from those who are ideologically committed to its religious program as well as those who requested constituency service from an Ennahda member. By showing that programmatic and particularistic appeals explain voter support for Islamist parties, this research extends the literature on Islam and politics and illustrates the importance of party capacity for developing a voter base in transitional contexts.

Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia, Edward Aspinall, Meredith L. Weiss, Allen Hicken and Paul D. Hutchcroft

How and why does distributive politics differ across and within countries? This book aims to provide a comparative framework of distributive politics focusing mainly on three Southeast Asian countries: Malaysia, the Philippines, and Indonesia. It seeks to capture the distinct patterns of electoral mobilization regimes, i.e., the way in which patronage is distributed through networks. Instead of restricting the scope to a specific aspect, such as clientelism or pork barrel, the study focuses on patronage broadly defined as ‘a material resource distributed for particularistic benefits for political purposes’, ranging from the micro- (individuals or households), meso- (geographic, associational, or sectoral groups), to macro-level (national or regional) resources to be tailored for particularistic benefits. Despite the wholistic perspective, the strength of this study lies in a decade-long, extensive collaborative research involving more than 200 researchers, which enabled the authors to dive into the microcosm of distributive politics. They conducted numerous interviews with diverse actors as well as a series of surveys of not only electorates (Malaysia in 2013 and 2016, the Philippines in 2013 and 2019, and Indonesia in 2014) but also brokers (in the Philippines and Indonesia).

Policy Influence of Delegates in Authoritarian Legislatures: Evidence from China

Can delegates in authoritarian legislatures influence policy outcomes? The existing literature provides extensive knowledge on how delegates behave but relatively little evidence on how government processes delegate policy participation and whether such participation changes policy. Based on a unique dataset of government responses to delegates’ policy proposals in China, this paper proposes a new distributive theory of authoritarian legislature and explains the conditions under which delegates can influence policy. The findings show that proposals requesting particularistic benefits are more likely to receive acceptance when they are made by delegates representing regime allies, whereas proposals requesting universalistic benefits are more likely to attain acceptance if they come from delegates representing the public. This finding can shed new light on authoritarian legislatures and their influence on policy. It also reveals a new theory of how autocrats make tradeoffs in allocating resources to accommodate competing policy demands and provide public goods.

Local Candidates, Place-Based Identities, and Electoral Success

While a large body of literature empirically documents an electoral advantage for local candidates, the exact mechanisms accounting for this effect remain less clear. We integrate theories on the political geography of candidate-voter relations with socio-psychological accounts of citizens’ local attachment, arguing that citizens vote for candidates from their own local communities as an expression of their place-based identity. To test our argument, we exploit a unique feature of the German mixed-member electoral system. We identify the causal effect of candidates’ localness by relying on within-electoral-district variation coupled with a geo-matching strategy on the level of municipalities (hbox {N}=11175). The results show that voters exhibit a strong bias in favor of local candidates even when they are not competitive. More than only expecting particularistic benefits from representatives, citizens appear to vote for candidates from their own local community to express their place-based social identity.

Paying to party: Candidate resources and party switching in new democracies

Party switching among legislative candidates has important implications for accountability and representation in democratizing countries. We argue that party switching is influenced by campaign costs tied to the clientelistic politics that persist in many such countries. Candidates who are expected to personally pay for their campaigns, including handouts for voters, will seek to affiliate with parties that can lower those costs through personal inducements and organizational support. Campaign costs also drive candidate selection among party leaders, as they seek to recruit candidates who can finance their own campaigns. We corroborate these expectations with an original survey and embedded choice experiment conducted among parliamentary candidates in Zambia. The conjoint analysis shows that candidates prefer larger parties that offer particularistic benefits. The survey further reveals that parties select for business owners as candidates—the very candidates most likely to defect from one party to another.

Public Broadcasting Is Not Much Different: Public and Commercial Broadcasters’ Coverage of Minimum Wage in South Korea

ABSTRACT This article provides a framing analysis of media coverage of minimum wage between public and commercial broadcasters in South Korea. To do this, the current study content analyzed 1505 news reports about “minimum wage” aired by two public television broadcasters and two commercial television broadcasters in 2018. The analysis finds that both public and commercial broadcasters directed citizens’ attention to the new policy’s collective harms framed as “increasing unemployment” and “harms to the economy,” while deemphasizing the particularistic benefits of the minimum wage increase and the resulting reduction of inequality gap between the rich and the poor. Further, all the broadcasters have not provided citizens with enough information necessary for a balanced assessment of the pros and cons of the minimum wage increase.

Ask and You May Receive: Senators’ Strategies for Securing Particularistic Benefits

How do congressional leaders efficiently distribute particularistic benefits? When allocating funding, they face a problem: they want to help the rank-and-file, but do not know what projects are most valuable to their colleagues. I argue that leaders use two strategies to ensure projects are allocated efficiently, namely they reliably fund members’ top priorities and line items that cost them little bargaining capital. Doing so allows them to bank political goodwill while guaranteeing that the rank-and-file have politically valuable credit-claiming opportunities. By matching senators’ confidential prioritized requests for two appropriations bills from the 1990s to legislative outcomes, I examine how Senate leaders distributed federal funding. My findings show that the two strategies I identify strongly predict how much of a request is funded. Moreover, priorities and low-cost requests are more strongly associated with project funding than other factors commonly identified in the distributive politics literature. These results shed new light on how leaders distribute favors in Congress as well as help explain mixed findings about both who receives particularistic benefits and their electoral consequences.

Adjustment Policies, Union Structures, and Strategies of Mobilization: Teacher Politics in Mexico and Argentina

This article analyzes the evolving mobilizational strategies of robust unions in contemporary Latin America. The origins of these strategies are rooted in the neoliberal adjustment policies in the early 1990s that compensated and reshaped power relations in labor organizations. With union compensation, a dominant faction concentrated power and embraced instrumentalism; the union exchanged electoral support with various parties for particularistic benefits. When adjustment policies were adopted without compensation, power was dispersed in an archipelago of activists. Unions then relied on movementism, which centered on contentious demand making and resistance to partisan alliances. Comparing teachers in Mexico and Argentina, this article contributes to broader debates about the effects of democracy on contentious politics and the changing partisan identities of workers.

Left is right and right is left? Partisan difference on social welfare and particularistic benefits in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan

AbstractThis paper investigates elite-level partisan differences along the socioeconomic dimension in three developed East Asian democracies – Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. On the one hand, the mainstream literature in welfare studies and party politics expects left- and right-leaning parties should vary significantly in utilizing social policy promises. On the other hand, the path dependency logic tells us that left–right difference should be found over particularistic benefits, such as agricultural subsidies or construction projects, considering that these were central means for right-leaning parties to maintain their power during the developmental state period in the three countries. Using an original bill-sponsorship data set between 1987 and 2012, we find that there has not been any substantial difference in the agenda setting of conventional social welfare bills between left- and right-wing government periods. However, a clear elective affinity can be observed between established right-wing parties and particularistic benefits. The paper shows that contextualizing key political actors' preferences can lead to a more systematic understanding of political dynamics behind the socioeconomic dimension in non-Anglo-European countries.

Social Trust and Electoral Populism: Explaining the Quality of Government

Voters would be better off if they removed politicians offering low-quality government by pursuing populist policies and re-elected those who improved government quality with sustainable policies. In many political contexts, including those with free and fair elections, voters do the opposite. Low social trust can account for this paradox: voters must act collectively to shape political incentives, but low trust among voters is an obstacle to collective action. If every voter believes that fellow voters will accept particularistic benefits from poorly performing governments that keep them from voting against those governments, no voter has an incentive to select politicians who promise high-quality government. By the same logic, low social trust prevents voters from sanctioning politicians who renege on their promises. Frequent reneging on campaign promises, in turn, leads voters to hold low political trust. Low quality government, and in particular populism, emerge as optimal electoral strategies of political candidates in this environment. We analyze new survey data from 5,800 respondents in seven Latin American countries that provides support for a novel argument about populism and the quality of government: voters who express low trust are significantly more likely to prefer populist policies that reflect a low quality of government.

Theory and Methods in the Study of Distributive Politics

While many scholars have moved toward using individual-level data to test theories of distributive politics, no studies have ever explicitly examined differences between individual and aggregate analyses of a distributive program. By leveraging nationwide individual-level data on both revealed voter preferences and the actual receipt of particularistic benefits through a contemporary Venezuelan land reform initiative, this article demonstrates that scholars can most effectively test and refine individual-level theories of distributive politics by combining both individual- and macro-level data. There are at least two advantages to doing so. First, comparing and contrasting findings from data at different levels of analysis can enable researchers to paint a more complete picture of distributive targeting. Second, when distributive benefits can be impacted or redirected by subnational politicians, as is common with many distributive programs, individual-level data alone can generate mistaken inferences that are an artifact of competing targeting attempts at different levels of government instead of initial targeting strategies. I demonstrate both of these points and discuss practical and simple recommendations regarding data collection strategies for the purposes of effectively testing theories of distributive politics.

Network Ties and the Political Strategies of Firms

It is well established that connections to government officials confer important benefits to firms. However, past work has ignored the crucial role that ties to other firms in the same industry (peer ties) also play in facilitating firms’ political participation. We develop new theory that contrasts the effects of these two distinct types of social ties. We argue that peer ties facilitate collective action, most often with respect to broad policy issues that affect many firms. In contrast, we expect that direct ties to government officials (government ties) are primarily used to pursue narrow, particularistic benefits. Using a new survey of foreign- owned firms operating in the Philippines, we find that peer ties facilitate firms’ political participation at the national level, where issues are more likely to affect large numbers of firms. Government ties are also valuable, though primarily at the local level, where issues are narrower in scope.

I Sell My Vote, and So What? A New Database and Evidence from Colombia

Exchanging one's vote for particularistic benefits - practices usually grouped under 'clientelism' - is often thought to weaken programmatic links between citizens and politicians and disincentivize public good provision, as well as undermine voter autonomy and the ideal role of elections. However, empirically analyzing this key phenomenon for the working of democracies entails formidable challenges. We conduct list experiments on a large sample of households to estimate the incidence of clientelistic vote buying, as well as the extent to which respondents refrain from openly recognizing this behavior. Nearly one out of every five respondents engage in clientelism and, surprisingly, they do not feel ashamed to admit it. Using the literature to guide our analysis, we examine the robust correlates of clientelism, finding that vote buying increases with poverty, reciprocity, disregard for the rule of law and, challenging several theories, interest in politics.

Local favoritism in at-large proportional representation systems

Pork barrel spending is typically attributed to the strategic behavior of political elites hoping to be electorally rewarded by voters residing in their districts. Such behavior is expected to depend on the incentives imposed by the electoral system. We estimate the causal effect of local representation in a closed-list proportional representation system where individual candidates have no clear electoral incentive to favor their hometown. Using data from Norwegian regional governments, we still find a hometown bias. We document that municipalities with a representative on the regional council from the same party as the regional governor tend to obtain more funding for local investments. Citizens also tend to vote more often for parties whose gubernatorial candidate is from their own hometown, consistent with expectations of particularistic benefits. A possible explanation is that regional council members are often recruited from local politics and remain loyal to their roots. We find no evidence that regional council experience affects politicians' future career prospects at the local level.

The Role of Subnational Politicians in Distributive Politics

This article examines how the partisanship of empowered subnational politicians can affect within-district benefit distribution. I present a theory of the role of subnational politicians in distributive politics, and then test this theory on a distributive Venezuelan land reform initiative by leveraging unique individual-level data on revealed voter preferences and the receipt of particularistic benefits. Using data from a list of millions of voters who signed petitions to recall former President Chávez, I match information on recent land grant applicants to petition signers to measure how political preferences affect the likelihood of applying for and receiving land, and how state governors condition this relationship. I find evidence for both strategic core voter targeting and blockage of benefits to opposition voters. These effects, however, are modified by the political affiliation of governors. The findings point to the importance of considering how intervening subnational politicians influence distributive politics, particularly under federal structures.

Ex Post Lobbying

Nearly half of all lobbying activity targeting specific bills between 1998 and 2012 happened after the Congress passed legislation, yet existing theories of lobbying generally fail to account for lobbying that occurs after a bill is passed. I argue that ex post lobbying aims to influence the distribution of particularistic benefits that will arise from legislation by targeting regulatory rule-making processes. I develop a model that describes lobbying as a collective action problem among interest groups, who must trade off between spending money to lobby for a bill’s passage and spending money to lobby over the details of its implementation. The implications of the model suggest that bills with high proportions of particularistic provisions draw more ex post lobbying and that trade associations and larger firms bear a disproportionately large share of the ex ante lobbying burden. Empirical analysis of lobbying reports is consistent with these predictions.

Targeted Campaign Appeals and the Value of Ambiguity

Political campaigns increasingly micro-target. Given detailed knowledge of voters’ identities, campaigns try to persuade voters by pandering to these identities. Through multiple survey experiments, we examine the persuasiveness of group-directed pandering. We ask: Do group members respond more favorably to appeals geared to them, or do they prefer broad-based appeals? Do voters not in a group penalize candidates who appeal to a group? Answers to these questions help us grapple with the evolving relationship between voters and candidates in a rapidly changing information environment. Our results suggest that voters rarely prefer targeted pandering to general messages and that “mistargeted” voters penalize candidates enough to erase the positive returns to targeting. Theoretically, targeting may allow candidates to quietly promise particularistic benefits to narrow audiences, thereby altering the nature of political representation, but voters seem to prefer being solicited based on broad principles and collective benefits.

Politics versus Risk in Allocations of Federal Security Grants

Distributive political theory is applied to whether politics versus risk determines government spending across four grant programs purposed for homeland security. A model of security funding is tested with data from U.S. states from 2004 to 2006. Findings support politics over risk when programs are designed to award universal benefits to elected officials, such as with fair-sharing policies. However, risk explains funding when programs award narrow, particularistic benefits, such as with urban security initiatives. A key conclusion is that fair-share strategies in grant politics can actually produce unfair allocation outcomes in the area of security. Also, protecting status quo formulas is in the interest of political actors, especially if they might otherwise lose opportunities to secure resources for constituents (state and local governments) in a distressed economy.