In the last twenty years, Latin American political parties have become increasingly dependent on the distribution of public resources to maintain the support of large numbers of voters. Among the many goods distributed by political parties none is more important than public employment, guaranteeing a secure and relatively well-paid income over long periods of time, often under the direct supervision of party officials. The exchange of employment for political support is known as political patronage and its study is the main objective of this research.
Understanding the size and structure of patronage is a crucial endeavor for newly democratized countries, where an increasing numbers of citizens depend on the benefits provided by elected officials for their material survival. Patronage spending unfairly benefits incumbent parties, which abuse their preferential access to public resources to deter further competition and perpetuate their members in office. No research, however, has measured the extent of these patronage exchanges or its effect on the overall size of the public sector. The researchers measure the size and structure of patronage in Latin America, and provide the first systematic assessment of the effect of patronage networks on the public sector.
To measure the size and structure of patronage, the researchers take advantage of recent developments in network analysis that use indirect survey questions of the form "how many X's do you know?" to estimate the size of hard-to-count populations. Estimation is carried in two steps: first, they measure the size of the respondent's personal network combining information about well known group sizes to the answers provided by each respondent. Once the researchers know the size and location of each respondent within the network, they can estimate the size of the different subpopulations involved in the patronage exchange.
To estimate the size of patronage networks, the researchers gather survey data from two recently democratized countries: Argentina and Chile. With very different party systems and public sectors, these countries allow researchers to measure the size of patronage networks and explain what determines their relative success. Among the most significant hypothesis to be tested are the relationship between the type of public employment - permanent, temporary, and by-contract - and the choice of patronage recruitment. A large national sample also allow the researchers to measure the effect of other variables such as the level of urbanization, the likelihood of monitoring by elected officials, and the effect of heightened political competition.
