Clientelism Without Machines

Clientelism involves organizational costs. In contexts where clientelism is pervasive, party machines assume these costs with their own organizational resources and party brokers. In weakly institutionalized party systems, candidates turn to party substitutes to use clientelism for campaigns and demonstrate electoral viability. However, none of these theories explain how policy-oriented parties cover the organizational costs to include clientelism in their electioneering strategy. Leveraging data from Chile, one of the most programmatic contexts in Latin America, I show that parties can rely on clientelism as a complementary strategy at the municipal level. Politicians do so by using local groups as mobilizing structures that assume the cost of clientelism in exchange for targeted distribution to address members’ demands. The framework expects that programmatic parties are more likely to engage in clientelism with local groups that invest in vertically integrated structures than with those that preclude them. I provide further empirical support by testing my framework in two "shadow cases": Seville, Spain, and Naples, Italy.