Conditionality & Coercion

Electoral clientelism in Eastern Europe

Dados Bibliográficos

ID23398131
AutoresIsabela Mares (0000-0002-8315-9708, Professor of Political Science, Yale University), Lauren E Young (0000-0002-7695-7437, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of California Davis)
Ano2019
Páginas336
Data de publicação2019-10-17
Open AccessNão
TipoBOOK
PeriódicoConditionality and Coercion (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditoraOxford University PressOxford (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/oso/9780198832775.001.0001
OpenAlexW4238496381
Open LibraryOL28730215M
ISBN9780198832775
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas67
Referências citadas92

In many recent democracies, candidates compete for office using illegal strategies to influence voters. In Hungary and Romania, local actors including mayors and bureaucrats offer access to social policy benefits to voters who offer to support their preferred candidates, and they threaten others with the loss of a range of policy and private benefits for voting the “wrong” way. These quid pro quo exchanges are often called clientelism. How can politicians and their accomplices get away with such illegal campaigning in otherwise democratic, competitive elections? When do they rely on the worst forms of clientelism that involve threatening voters and manipulating public benefits? This book uses a mixed method approach to understand how illegal forms of campaigning including vote buying and electoral coercion persist in two democratic countries in the European Union. It argues that clientelistic strategies must be disaggregated based on whether they use public or private resources, and whether they involve positive promises or negative threats and coercion. The authors document that the type of clientelistic strategies that candidates and brokers use varies systematically across localities based on their underlying social coalitions, and also show that voters assess and sanction different forms of clientelism in different ways. Voters glean information about politicians’ personal characteristics and their policy preferences from the clientelistic strategies these candidates deploy. Most voters judge candidates who use clientelism harshly. So how does clientelism, including its most odious coercive forms, persist in democratic systems? This book suggests that politicians can get away with clientelism by using forms of it that are in line with the policy preferences of constituencies whose votes they need. Clientelistic and programmatic strategies are not as distinct as previous studies have argued.

Coercion (linguistics) · Conditionality · Political science · Politics · Law · Philosophy · Political Conflict and Governance · Politics and Society in Latin America · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Corrupt practices · Elections · Europe · politics and government