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Abstract
Clientelism has been largely defined as an electoral strategy in which politicians distribute resources to voters to gather their support. This study proposes a new framework to understand clientelism by inverting the perspective of this practice, focusing on voters rather than politicians. This study proposes that clientelism should be understood not as an exchange or tie but as a logic of practice of politics in which politics is experienced as a method by which to access personal or collective goods through constant negotiation with politicians. This inversion has large implications for how clientelism is expected to occur and for how scholars should investigate this practice. Rather than looking at how politicians seek to distribute resources to gather the most votes, this study focuses on the strategies implemented by voters to secure their access to politicians’ assistance. This inversion leads not only to a more nuanced picture of clients and their agency but also to a different account of voters’ voting choices in clientelist contexts. Instead of understanding voters’ electoral choices as either a result of coercion or an expression of preference, this study argues that the vote should be understood within the broader strategies that popular segments have traditionally enacted to secure their access to politicians and to legitimize their claims for resources and assistance from political elites.
This study shows that traditional uses of the vote as a strategy by voters to secure access to politicians is rooted in historical, elite notions of political deservedness in Brazil, in which low-level politicians, acting as clients, seek to legitimize their requests for resources from upper-level politicians based on the idea that they have helped the latter obtain office. The deployment of popular segments of elite notions of political deservedness helps explain why voters value a candidate’s electoral viability more than the candidate’s honesty or quality as a patron. By siding with likely winners, and claiming that they have helped the politician win office, voters can leverage their vote to gain access to the politician.
The importance of electoral viability to voters shapes politicians’ electoral strategies, especially the use of vote buying. Given the existence of a larger belief that only those who have money can win elections, politicians use vote buying as a tool to display wealth and perform notions of political strength. Not all politicians are equally skilled in performing notions of strength when dealing with voters’ demands, and programmatic politicians who are not fluent in clientelist styles of politics or who are from humble backgrounds are particularly disadvantaged. Entrenched images of what rightful political leaders look like and how they are expected to act were built over a long history of political mobilization in which local politics was monopolized by prominent wealthy white men who heavily engaged in clientelist practice to embody notions of strength. By representing the antithesis of this image of strength, programmatic politicians from humble backgrounds face difficulty in being accepted by voters as relevant political actors. However, some programmatic politicians have been able to overcome the stigma of irrelevance by, again, deploying the same elite strategies of engaging in vote buying and allying with local elites in their attempt to embody strength.
