Patron-Client Networks Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Patron-client networks are formed between individuals of unequal social status for mutual gain. Patron-client ties involve two-person, face-to-face relationships in which individuals of higher social status or political power (the patron) use their resources or power to give material benefits or provide security to individuals of lower social status or influence (clients). In return, as a condition of the relationship, clients offer political support such as votes and services such as unremunerated labor to the patron.

Political recruitment and upward mobility within political organizations often takes place through hierarchical networks of patron-client relationships, with aspiring politicians and persons newly elected to local or even national office serving as clients of more established politicians, and those established politicians themselves supporting those higher in the organizational hierarchy, such as party leaders. Camarillas of the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and factions of the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) are prominent examples of patron-client networks. These networks eventually reach down to the individual voter.

Patron-client ties are built on both instrumental and affective considerations between the partners to the relationship. Scholars debate the extent to which these links are built on a norm of reciprocity, with clients valuing the personal and ongoing character of the relationship and expressing deep feelings of loyalty to the patron, or on the basis of the client’s fear that benefits distributed by the patron may be disrupted if the patron fails to provide support. Patron-client relationships are both voluntary and, because of the asymmetric character of the bond, exploitative. In contrast to formal citizenship norms in modern political regimes, which stress universalism and equality of access to public resources, patron-client ties are highly personal and particularistic; indeed, patron-client relationships have value precisely because they allow individuals to circumvent the universalistic rules of modern societies and gain access to public resources on advantageous terms.

Patron-client networks operate most effectively where the patron—whether an individual or an organization, such as a political party—can verify that the client has fulfilled the quid pro quo, whether that be to vote for the patron’s preferred candidate or to support the patron’s faction in an intraparty leadership contest or to campaign for the patron’s party. The secret ballot, if truly confidential, can thoroughly undermine patron-client networks. However, because patrons often have multiple clients—often unknown to each other, since the relationship is vertical and dyadic—they often have means to confirm whether particular clients provided the requisite support. Patron-client ties become more important when ideological divisions fail to motivate individual political choice (i.e., where parties do not differ much programmatically, they may have to call on their patron-client networks to buy votes).

Patron-client networks imply that the clients’ support can be bought, which suggests that clients are more likely to be poor. As a parallel point, patrons or the organizations acting as patrons (e.g., parties in government) must have significant divisible resources to distribute selectively. Mexico’s PRI found its capacity to maintain its clientelist networks eroded when the state pursued neoliberal economic policies after 1985, selling off many of the sources of clientelist distribution, such as jobs. In Japan, the LDP’s capacity to reproduce patronclient networks has been reinforced by the incapacity of local governments to generate significant revenues, hence leaving them reliant on local politicians elected as national legislators to act as brokers for discrete distributions to the locality. Well-connected client politicians in the LDP more effectively gain such distributions from party leaders who control the legislature than do opposition party representatives.

Certain political institutions favor patron-client relationships. The personal vote, practiced in Japan and Brazil, has been linked to the clientelism rife in those societies. The lack of civil service professionalization allows parties to use public jobs as the patronage they can distribute to clients; the latter is particularly likely if the franchise was broadened before civil service rules came into force.

Political parties that are little more than unions for legislative cooperation—run by politicians operating patron-client networks—tend to be ideologically inconsistent, politically fragmented, and subject to defections when in opposition. They tend to favor the creation of publicly funded private goods—those they can distribute via their networks in lieu of public goods provision.

Bibliography:

Eisenstadt, S. N., and Luis Roniger. Patrons, Clients, and Friends: Interpersonal Relations and the Structure of Trust in Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Kitschelt, Herbert, and Steven Wilkenson, eds. Patrons, Clients, and Policies: Patterns of Democratic Accountability and Political Competition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Roniger, Luis, and Ayse Gunes-Ayata. Democracy, Clientelism, and Civil Society. Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1994.
Scott, James C. “Patron-client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia.” American Political Science Review 66, no. 1 (1972): 91–113.
Stokes, Susan C. “Perverse Accountability: A Formal Model of Machine Politics with Evidence from Argentina.” American Political Science Review 99, no. 3 (2005): 315–325.

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