Calvo and Murillo 2012

Calvo, E., and M. V. Murillo. 2012. "When Parties Meet Voters: Assessing Political Linkages Through Partisan Networks and Distributive Expectations in Argentina and Chile". Comparative Political Studies.

• Comparing linkages between voters and parties (2)
• clientelistic: “activist networks screen deserving from undeserving voters and mediate access to goods”
• programmatic: “”the group of beneficiaries is defined by policy and access is independent from partisan distribution networks”
• Current framework presumes that
• programmatic party elites are responsive to voters with ideological affinity, and will create policies to benefit them
• clientelistic parties specialize in delivery goods to a private menu of voters
• BUT on the ground its tough to tell when parties are being clientelistic or programmatic, or both (2-3)
• This article defines linkages based on VOTER’S EXPECTATIONS of accessing benefits through partisan networks of programmatic policies (4)
• democratization in LAm has been accompanied by non-programmatic parties that rely almost entirely on clientelism
• Distribution expectations have three components (5)
• socioeconomic status drives demand for redistribution through politics
• weight that individual voters attach to the likelihood of receiving benefits based on ideological proximity to parties
• weight that individual voters attach to the likelihood of receiving benefits based on
• proximity to and relationships with party members
• parties without organizational capacity must, then, come almost entirely from programmatic linkages
• neat way to gauge size of networks and party capacity (7)
• General characterization of party systems (8)
• Chile: mainly programmatic (8)
• Chilean voters can easily identify where a party sits on the left/right spectrum (9-10)
• Argentina: mainly clientelistic
• Argentines cannot easily identify left/right program of parties (10)
• General size of parties activists (as a proportion of population) same in both Chile and Argentina (12)
• evenly spread among parties in Chile
• heavily skewed to PJ in Argentina
• Chile has more institutions to block political clientelism, Argentina mainly based on clientelism (14)
• expectations/hypotheses (15-16)
• Argentina
• proximity to party members significant predictor of voters’ expectations of receiving handouts, a job, and public works (17)
• ideological distance has no significance (21)
• proximity to party activists has strong effect for both PJ and UCR (21)
• expectations of voters rely more heavily on proximity to party activists for handouts and jobs, though the effect declines for public works (24)
• Chile
• proximity to party members has no effect in Chile, though ideological distance is a strong predictor for the Concertación parties (17)
• the greater the ideological distance the lower expectation of receiving targeted benefits, effect is significant for Concertación, insignificant for rightist parties (21)
• proximity to party has no significance (21)
• voters rely on ideological cues to gauge expectations of public spending, patronage, etc (24)
• IN BOTH COUNTRIES
• ideological distance and party proximity have important effect on receiving public works (21)
• voters identify networks and ideology as mechanisms that shape their perception of the political distribution of goods (23)
• CONCLUSION
• “the mechanisms determining access to excludable goods...shape voters’ perceptions of subsequent iterations in benefit distribution” (25)