Consolidation of New Democracy, Mass Attitudes and Clientelism

Abstract:     
In many democratic countries, especially those in which democracy is new, democracy is fragile and not fully consolidated, meaning that crucial political groups lack full commitment to the democratic process. The survival of democracy cannot be taken for granted. There are now a number of models that consider how economic policy should be used to address fragility of democracy. They focus on the importance of different groups and hence come up with different policy recommendations. We present a model that can encompass these differing views allowing us to compare them and link these models to theoretical and empirical work on clientelism.

Keywords: clientelism, new democracy, Democratic consolidation, elites, masses

JEL Classification: D72, H3, P16

Accepted Paper Series