Clientelism, State Capacity and Economic Development: A Cross-National Study

Abstract

What accounts for cross-national variation in political clientelism? We consider two prominent explanations, economic wealth and state capacity, and test them on a new dataset of political clientelism. Although economic wealth is a strong predictor of contemporaneous clientelism, especially for developing polities, our theory emphasizes a developmental threshold beyond which the effect of historical state capacity replaces economic wealth as the primary predictor of cross-national variation in clientelism. Voters in countries that have surpassed this income threshold find clientelistic goods relatively unattractive if the bureaucracy has already established a credible reputation for delivering public goods over time. Supportive evidence for the theory is found in an examination of differences in clientelism across eighty-eight countries.

Keywords: clientelism, economic development, state capacity