Political Control of Bureaucracies as an Incentive for Political Party Behaviour

This paper examines theoretically and empirically the institutional conditions relevant to political linkage strategies between voters and parties. More specifically, we analyze whether the extent to which the public administration is politically controlled affects political parties’ choice between clientelistic or programmatic approaches to building electoral support. Previous explanations of the prevalence of clientelism have focused heavily on factors such economic development, ethnic cleavages and party competition. Building on the early work of Martin Shefter (1994) and Barbara Geddes (1994), we argue that a politicized bureaucracy greatly expands parties’ and individual politicians’ opportunities to use public resources to reward constituents in a particularistic fashion. The analyses employ data on bureaucratic structures from the Quality of Government Institute expert survey and recently published data on clientelism from Herbert Kitschelt’s Democratic Accountability and Linkages Project. The patterns evinced in the data are more consistent with this theorized association than with other predictors of clientelism found in the literature.