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Political machines (or clientelist parties) mobilize electoral support by trading particularistic benefits to voters in exchange for their votes. But if the secret ballot hides voters' actions from the machine, voters are able to renege, accepting benefits and then voting as they choose. To explain how machine politics works, I observe that machines use their deep insertion into voters' social networks to try to circumvent the secret ballot and infer individuals' votes. When parties influence how people vote by threatening to punish them for voting for another party, I call this perverse accountability. I analyze the strategic interaction between machines and voters as an iterated prisoners' dilemma game with one-sided uncertainty. The game generates hypotheses about the impact of the machine's capacity to monitor voters, and of voters' incomes and ideological stances, on the effectiveness of machine politics. I test these hypotheses with data from Argentina.
Thirty-five years ago, James Scott (1969) observed that political life of contemporary new nations bore a strong resemblance to the machine politics of the United States in earlier eras. The patronage, particularism, and graft endemic to the Philippines or Malaysia in the postwar decades recalled, for Scott, the Tweed machine in nineteenth-century New York or the Dawson machine in twentieth-century Chicago. Much has happened in the third of a century since Scott outlined "the contours and dynamics of the 'machine model' in comparative perspective" (1143). Many of the new nations that occupied his analysis have undergone transitions to electoral democracy; yet politics in these systems often remains particularistic, clientelistic, and corrupt. We therefore have a larger sample of countries, and a richer experience on which to draw, to understand the contours and dynamics of the machine. The historiography of the U.S. political machine has also grown, as have historical studies of patronage and vote buying in the history of today's advanced European democracies (see, e.g., Piattoni 2001). Finally, a formal literature on redistributive politics has developed, one in which the political machine plays a central role.
Yet the formal literature on the political machine leaves some crucial questions unanswered. Chief among them: How does the machine keep voters from reneging on the implicit deal whereby the machine distributes goods and the recipient votes for the machine? If voters...