Conceptualising Clientelism from the Client’s Point of View: a Two-Dimensional Typology of Clientelist Engagement

More often than not, clientelism is conceptualized as an upside-down principal-agent relationship in which the citizen (client) is accountable to the politician (patron), rather than the other way around. This characteristic of clientelist linking strongly deviates from the normative ideal of democracy and is famously described as ‘perverse accountability’ in a seminal paper by Stokes (2005). Recent studies, however, underline the diversity of clientelist linkages (Nichter 2010, Gans-Morse et al. 2014) and clientelist inducements (Mares and Young 2016), prompting a rethinking of the position of the client within the infamous linkage. One such attempt is made by Nichter and Peress (2017), who formally model a distinct variety of clientelism in which the client assumes a heightened bargaining power and enhanced autonomy vis-a-vis the political machine. This paper puts forward a conceptualization on the varieties of clientelist linking relevant to the point of view of the client. In the conceptualization, the role and position of the client varies in respect to two dimensions originally developed almost half a century ago by Scott (1972). In the first dimension, clients differentiate between the level of voluntarism and coercion which characterizes citizen engagement in the clientelist relationship. In the second dimension, clients vary in their motivations, which at the one end of the continuum are instrumental-rational and at the other are normative-affective. The conceptualization is effective in ‘capturing’ different types of clientelism identified in the literature: vote selling, turnout selling, abstention selling, receiving rewards by virtue of party loyalism, benefit-seeking, coercive clientelism and traditional (non-political) clientelism. At the same time, the conceptualization underscores the notion that some varieties of clientelism are better explained via the standard principal-agent framework than the ‘perverse accountability’ brand.