Clientelistic Parties In Latin America Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Clientelism is a pervasive feature of Latin American politics and is exhibited in varying degrees by most parties. Douglas Chalmers notes that clientelistic networks in Latin America are vertically organized from top to bottom and rely on the presence of brokers, political operatives who aggregate demands from their communities and distribute the benefits provided by the center. Although clientelism has been traditionally associated with face-to-face interactions, these brokers enable clientelistic parties to develop links with a broader segment of the population without establishing personal contact. After all, as Herbert Kitschelt argues, these face-to-face interactions are only one extreme of the patron-client relationship continuum; anonymous party machines provide the other extreme. In both cases, however, communities rich in votes but poor in resources receive selective material incentives in exchange for their votes. Clientelistic parties, Kitschelt contends, build multilevel political machines that go from the top of the political center down to remote municipalities. These parties do not purse specific political or ideological agendas (what Kitschelt calls “programmatic linkages”) but instead rely on the provision of selective incentives to garner electoral support.

The best representative of clientelistic parties in Latin America is Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI (its Spanish initials). Founded in 1928 under a different name, the PRI became the official party of the revolution and established a one-party rule regime that lasted until 2000.The PRI successfully combined clientelism with a corporatist mode of interest representation by incorporating many labor and civil society organizations into the party, thus turning them into de facto state organizations. The PRI used its governmental monopoly to dispense favors to key constituents groups including labor, peasant, and state employee unions. Caciques, local brokers with strong influence in their communities, became crucial to the longevity of PRI rule. But caciques were not total instruments of the party higher-ups as they retained significant sources of local power. Other examples of parties that built powerful clientelistic networks based on their access to state resources include Venezuela’s Acción Democrática, Costa Rica’s Partido Liberación Nacional, and the Peronist party in Argentina.

Many populist leaders created clientelistic parties as a result of their efforts to build durable electoral support. Some of these parties achieved a small degree of organizational consistency and managed to survive the death of their leaders. In other cases, the parties had no organizational structure and failed to outlast their founders. In Brazil, for instance, Getulio Vargas, a populist leader, created organizations that achieved some life of their own. In 1945, after leaving office,Vargas founded two parties (the Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro and the Partido Social Democrático) that relied largely on the clientelistic networks he developed during his Estado Novo (1937–1945) regime. In Ecuador, by contrast, José María Velasco Ibarra, populist leader par excellence, created vast clientelistic networks that supported his five successful bids for the presidency but failed to create a party of his own. His followers, known as Velasquistas, worked in alliance with different parties that offered electoral support to their leader at different points in time. Also in Ecuador, a more structured clientelistic party was founded in 1949 by a local caudillo in the city of Guayaquil under the name of Concentración de Fuerzas Populares.

The dramatic changes that the region has undergone in recent decades have weakened but not eliminated clientelism or clientelistic parties. In the 1990s, neopopulist leaders resorted to clientelistic practices in an effort to gain political support in a time of painful economic restructuration. In an ironic twist, radical market reforms implemented to reduce the role of the state in the economy then provided governments with the opportunity to establish state-funded food and job programs that turned into vast clientelistic operations. In Mexico and Peru, PRONASOL and FENDECODES, respectively, became the best-known examples of state clientelism in the neoliberal era, working in close association with the PRI in Mexico and Alberto Fujimori’s electoral vehicles in Peru. The practices were not clientelistic in all communities, yet, especially when cash transfers were involved, clearly were clientelistic in some of them. They were clientelistic to the extent that they provided selective incentives (scholarships, credit, granaries, livestock, and minor consumption goods) to some rather than to all of the community members. In the Peruvian case, Norbert Schady shows that clientelistic practices became more prevalent as opposition to the Fujimori regime mounted. More recently, Hugo Chávez replicated this model in Venezuela. His social programs, known as the Misiones, resorted to clientelistic practices aiming to shore up his electoral support as he confronted a tough recall election in 2004.

The well-documented demise of political parties in the region has not eliminated clientelism; it has only decentralized the sources of patronage. Brokers now find it more convenient to establish their own political organizations, or strike alliances with other regional brokers, rather than to pledge allegiance to declining national parties. Even when they do link up with national parties, many of these brokers act as independent operators, sharing only a party label with other brokers. An extreme case of this frequent occurrence is found in Colombia with their Liberal Party.

Bibliography:

Chalmers, Douglas. “Parties and Society in Latin America.” In Friends, Followers, and Factions: A Reader in Political Clientelism, edited by Steffen W. Schmidt, James C. Scott, Carl Landé, and Laura Guasti, 401–421. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977.
Cornelius,Wayne. Politics and the Migrant Poor in Mexico City. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975.
Kitschelt, Herbert. “Linkages between Citizens and Politicians in Democratic Politics.” Comparative Political Studies 33, no. 6/7 (2000): 845–879.
Magaloni, Beatriz, Alberto Diaz-Cayeros, and Federico Estévez. “Clientelism and Portfolio Diversification: A Model of Electoral Investment with Application to Mexico.” In Patrons, Clients, and Policies, edited by Herbert Kitschelt and Steven Wilkinson, 182–205. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Penfold-Becerra, Michael. “Clientelism and Social Funds: Evidence from Chávez’s Misiones.” Latin American Politics and Society 49, no. 4 (2007): 63–85.
Pizarro, Eduardo. “La atomización partidaria en Colombia: el fenómeno de las microempresas electorales.” In Degradación o cambio. Evolución del sistema político colombiano, edited by Francisco Gutierrez. Bogotá: Norma, 2002.
Roncagliolo, Rafael, and Carlos Meléndez. La política por dentro: Cambios y continuidades en las organizaciones políticas de los países andinos. Lima: IDEA Internacional, 2007.
Schady, Norbert. “The Political Economy of Expenditures by the Peruvian Social Fund, 1991–1995.” American Political Science Review 94, no. 2 (2000): 289–304.