This investigation assesses the causes and dynamics of clientelist political mobilization. Under clientelism, political parties offer low-income voters individualized payoffs in return for political support, rather than (or in addition to) programmatic benefits or public goods. The focus of the research funded by the National Science Foundation is Argentina, where scholarship suggests that parties adopt clientelist, programmatic, and other strategies when they attempt to generate electoral support. In Argentina, the researcher conducts interviews with party officials and operatives, expand an ecological database she is constructing that contains electoral, fiscal, and demographic data, and conduct a sample survey, to test theory-driven hypotheses about the conditions leading political parties deploy clientelist strategies and leading voters to be receptive to these strategies. The study evaluates the effects of economic structure, electoral rules, district size, and the density of social networks in encouraging parties to adopt clientelist strategies at the provincial and local levels, and the effects of risk-aversion, norms of reciprocity, and intimidation in encouraging voter receptivity to clientelism. The study has a broader impact for scholars of Argentine politics and for political and economic reformers in that country and in new democracies elsewhere. Regarding the first kind of impact, the study generates a large database with information on electoral returns, demographics, and budgetary and fiscal information, measured at the level of the municipality, for a number of Argentine provinces. This database would enter the public domain. Regarding benefits for economic and political reformers, theorists show that clientelism creates an incentive for parties to keep their constituents poor and dependent, even as they provide some valuable goods to these constituents. Clientelism in developing countries and new democracies therefore may create a poverty trap, feeding on and perpetuating poverty. Clientelism also diminishes the ability of voters to make autonomous electoral choices, hence tarnishing the quality of democracy. Studies such as this, that identify the causes of clientelism and the factors that undermine it, can serve as guides to reformers.
