Calvo and Murillo 2004

Calvo, Ernesto, and Maria Victoria Murillo. 2004. "Who Delivers? Partisan Clients in the Argentine Electoral Market". American Journal of Political Science. 48 (4): 742-757.

• Explaining returns to patronage by highlighting differences in the political parties’ access to resources (supply side) and voter’s dependence on public sector jobs (demand side) (742)
• differences in income levels and private sector alternatives affect a voter’s propensity to accept pork in exchange for support
• utility from patronage declines monotonically with income (or skills) (743)
• transfers to higher-income voters (middle classes) do not provide the same returns to pork as those to low-income voters (the poor)
• examples: PJ and UCR in Argentina
• Not all parties benefit equally from patronage spending
• Because government faces budget constraints, patrons face a trade-off between hiring larger numbers of public employees and providing larger public sector wages (745)
• political parties also have prior partisan links to constituents because they do not rely only on patronage to fulfill voters’ expectations
• Between 1983 and 2001, UCR and PJ both had two presidencies, BUT PJ controlled Senate the whole time, and usually controlled Lower House and regional/municipal governments (746)
• PJ subnational electoral coalitions were more extensive and more stable (747)
• Three elements helped PJ achieve better access to financial resources
• wider geographic dispersion of PJ vote
• majoritarian bias of electoral rules, created overrepresentation for rural areas where PJ was strong
• fiscal institutions favored PJ-dominated provinces
• even when PJ did not win presidency, it won a lot of governorships and thus kept control of a lot of fiscal resources (748)
• “public employment provides better electoral returns for the PJ than the UCR-Alianza in the Argentine electoral market” (750)
• changes in public employment have significant and positive effect on PJ vote, but not on the UCR vote (750-751)
• patronage jobs are better for PJ because PJ has more lower income constituents (751)
• PJ provinces have lower public wages and more public employees than UCR provinces (751)
• but external shocks like changes in skill distribution and labor market alternatives could influence patronage system (755)
• for labor-based party, patronage and welfare can serve as complementary redistributive instruments