Political Parties and Electoral Clientelism 3031372948, 9783031372940

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Political Parties and Electoral Clientelism Edited by Sergiu Gherghina Miroslav Nemčok

Political Parties and Electoral Clientelism

Sergiu Gherghina · Miroslav Nemˇcok Editors

Political Parties and Electoral Clientelism

Previously published in Acta Politica “Political Parties and Electoral Clientelism,” Volume 56, Issue 4, October 2021

Editors Sergiu Gherghina Department of Politics University of Glasgow Glasgow, UK

Miroslav Nemˇcok Department of Political Science University of Oslo Oslo, Norway

ISBN 978-3-031-37294-0 ISBN 978-3-031-37295-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37295-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023, corrected publication 2023 Chapters “Authoritarian clientelism: the case of the president’s ‘creatures’ in Cameroon” and “Coordinating the machine: subnational political context and the effectiveness of machine politics” are licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons. org/licenses/by/4.0/). For further details see license information in the chapters. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

The original version of the book has been revised: A correction to this book can be found at https:// doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-37295-7_9

Contents

Political Parties, State Resources and Electoral Clientelism . . . . . . . . . . . . Sergiu Gherghina and Miroslav Nemˇcok Clientelism and Distributive Politics in Australia: Comparing Partisan Pork Barrel with Contingency-Based Vote-Buying . . . . . . . . . . . . David Denemark Administrative Clientelism and Policy Reform Failure: The Western Canada Integrated Land Management Experience 1990–2015 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Michael Howlett and Jeremy Rayner

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Authoritarian Clientelism: The Case of the President’s ‘Creatures’ in Cameroon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sergiu Mi¸scoiu and Louis-Marie Kakdeu

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Coordinating the Machine: Subnational Political Context and the Effectiveness of Machine Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inga A.-L. Saikkonen

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Political Parties and Clientelism in Transition Countries: Evidence from Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sergiu Gherghina and Clara Volintiru

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Does clientelism hinder progressive social policy in Latin America? . . . . 104 Sarah Berens and Saskia Pauline Ruth-Lovell Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Sergiu Gherghina and Miroslav Nemˇcok Correction to: Political Parties and Electoral Clientelism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Sergiu Gherghina and Miroslav Nemˇcok

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Acta Politica (2021) 56:591–599 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-021-00216-5 EDITORIAL

Political parties, state resources and electoral clientelism Sergiu Gherghina1 · Miroslav Nemčok2 Published online: 13 September 2021 © Springer Nature Limited 2021

Abstract Contemporary political parties often use state resources to win elections. In this context, electoral clientelism evolved from the straightforward vote buying to sophisticated exchanges in which the relationship between patrons (parties or candidates) and clients (voters) is sometimes difficult to grasp. We address the question how do the distributive politics and electoral clientelism interact, how these forms of interactions differ across various context, and what implications they bring for the functioning of political systems. The special issue provides theoretical, methodological and empirical contributions to the burgeoning literature about the multi-faceted feature of electoral clientelism. It unfolds the complex relationship between distributive politics and clientelism, and conceptualizes electoral clientelism as a dynamic process that occurs through different sequences. It enriches the methodological tools aimed at investigating electoral clientelism. Finally, the special issue approaches clientelism from several perspectives and brings together substantive empirical evidence about the varieties of clientelism around the world. Keywords  Electoral clientelism · Political parties · Redistribution · State resources

Introduction The power acquired by the rulers is, in theory, tied to an expectation of accountability and responsiveness towards all citizens equally regardless of their political preferences. In reality, democratic accountability is sometimes replaced or complemented with a form of distributive politics in which political actors use the privileged access * Sergiu Gherghina [email protected] Miroslav Nemčok [email protected] 1

Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G12 8RT, UK

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Department of Political Science, University of Oslo, Moltke Moes vei 31, Eilert Sundts hus, blokk B, 0851 Oslo, Norway



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to state resources to get re-elected or to consolidating a medium-term relationship with the electorate (Dixit and Londregan 1996; Dahlberg and Johansson 2002; Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007; Gherghina 2013; Stokes et  al. 2013). This form of distributive politics is called electoral clientelism and includes three types of actors: patrons (parties or candidates) providing benefits, brokers facilitating the exchange as intermediaries, and the clients (voters) returning support for provided goods (Mares and Young 2016). It evolved from the straightforward vote buying where citizens exchange their votes in return for direct payment or preferential access to goods and services to more sophisticated exchanges in which the relationships between patrons and clients is sometimes difficult to grasp. Moreover, the vertical nexus with the voters (Kitschelt 2000; Stokes 2005; Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007; Stokes et al. 2013) was complemented by horizontal ties with private donors who make contributions in exchange for public procurement and influence on policy development (Gherghina and Volintiru 2017; Das and Maiorano 2019). However, despite relatively complex theoretical models, the demands to collect relevant data suitable for a comparative study are often too high. Most research in this field remains limited to a single or very few countries. As a result, scholars often guess how the findings from one system could travel and materialize to another context. That is where we aim to contribute. This special issue tackles the variety of electoral clientelism around the world from three perspectives; (1) what are the forms of interactions between the electoral clientelism and distributive politics; (2) to what degree do these forms of interaction differ across various political and social contexts; (3) do these patterns bear specific implications for the political systems in which they occur? In their attempt to address one of these questions, the contributions to this special issue provide novel additions to the theory, methodology, and empirical evidence helping to better understand the topic of electoral clientelism in a more comparative perspective. Most importantly, the special issue breaks down the complex relationship between distributive politics and electoral clientelism into different sequences, and hence provides relevant underlying processes operating deeper inside this complex phenomenon. The findings are accompanied by innovations in the research methodology and originally gathered empirical evidence. This aims to further support the future research to keep deepening our understanding of how political parties utilize public resources to improve their own standings in the democratic competition.

Emergence of electoral clientelism and some of its forms Electoral clientelism occurred gradually as a response to the transformation of party organizations. The shrinking of mass organizations limited the traditional type of resources previously flowing from party members (Dalton and Wattenberg 2000; van Biezen et al. 2012). Political parties faced an increasing pressure to secure finances for survival and sustainability and they adapted. As an immediate response, parties professionalized and sought to replace the missing resources with direct funding by private interests. This politically motivated model of party funding from private Reprinted from the journal

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capital was quickly perceived as a cause of clientelism and corruption. Hence, it was deemed unsuitable for a democratic governance serving equally the whole citizenship. Political parties got closer to the state, instead of private entities, and established mechanisms through which the resources provided by the state replaced the contributions from other politically motivated donors (Panebianco 1988; Katz and Mair 1995, 2009). This close connection with the state was used primarily to boost parties’ performance in electoral arena, but was soon institutionalized in the form of the funding provided directly to the political parties by state to support their functioning as professional organizations, recruiting political representatives and facilitating the link between the state and its citizens (van Biezen and Kopecký 2007, 2014). It is important to distinguish that the tighter connection between the parties and the state enabled parties to utilize two kinds of public resources. First, the state subsidies provided to active political parties to cover their operations as political organizations. This funding intends to provide political parties that end up in the opposition the means to survive throughout electoral cycle(s) so that the electoral competition is pluralist. Second, public funds are available considerably more to the governing parties which, thanks to their access to the office, can direct it to specific areas or publics. Earlier studies show that politicians in office often take advantage of state resources in various forms. One of the more apparent forms of electoral clientelism that can be clearly tracked with data is pork barrel. The existing literature shows that politicians intentionally bias money distribution to achieve favourable electoral outcomes (Denemark 2000; Costa-I-Font et al. 2003). The goal is to improve the local infrastructure and (often criticized) public services so that citizens can experience the positive change and become increasingly willing to support the incumbents and their political machines (Birch 1997; Hasen 2000; Stokes 2005; Stokes et al. 2013). They either target safe seats where the party member can win with a clear margin, or they focus on channelling resources to swing constituencies to avert the risk of losing (Dixit and Londregan 1996; Dahlberg and Johansson 2002). This targeting strategy is not entirely straightforward—especially in divided societies, electoral clientelism and ethno-politics appear intertwined. In such contexts, politicians tend to target their own ethnic groups (Dixit and Londregan 1996; Chandra 2007) and aim to mobilize their members (Nemčok et  al. 2020). As such, even a seemingly simple relationship between patrons and clients, i.e., vote buying, gets more complex in ethnically divided societies. Another form of electoral clientelism emerges on the horizontal nexus between parties and private donors. The central element is the office-seeking motivation of political actors who offer enhanced access to public procurements and policy-making in exchange for campaign contributions (Gherghina and Volintiru 2017). Various institutional factors (Hoare 1992; Khemani 2003) and background conditions (Stratmann 1995; Ansolabehere et al. 2004) may foster or halt the emergence of this type of exchange in a political system. In general, the literature identifies several strategies employed by political actors to use clientelism. Even though some generalizations are possible, the particular strategies often depend on political and social conditions typical for the studied 3

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cases. Moreover, the actions of patrons may further reflect their motivations which might seek short-term goals (e.g., improved electoral results), but also establishing of a long-lasting relationship with the electorate (Gherghina, 2013).

Studying electoral clientelism Several bodies of the literature mapped different types of clientelist behavior and referred to consequences of clientelism; for detailed reviews, see (Mares and Young 2019; Pellicer et al. 2021). The idea of clientelistic politics includes a strong normative component according to which any form of clientelistic exchange deviates from the ideal functioning of democratic regimes. Many analytical efforts focus on the deviations between ideal and real functioning of distributive politics (Hoare 1992; Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007; Stokes 2009; Stokes et al. 2013). This led scholars to search for deviations, to map the forms taken by clientelism across political systems, and to analyze the social, political, and historical roots of clientelism. The latter are well reflected in a series of recent studies on democratizing countries (Aspinall and Hicken 2020; Denissen 2020; Driscoll 2020; Veenendaal and Corbett 2020; Weiss 2020; Yıldırım 2020). The first studies on clientelism were conducted several decades ago and were case studies using mostly ethnographic techniques (Eisenstadt and Roniger 1984). Their findings could hardly translate into conceptual frameworks with broader applicability to other countries and contexts. Less inductive reasoning started to dominate the field during 2000s and it allowed to emerge a generally defined concept of clientelism in the context of mass politics which understands the relationship between patrons and clients as an exchange (Stokes 2009; Berenschot and Aspinall 2020). These paid extensive attention to the forms of clientelism and the linkages among its main actors: patrons, brokers and clients. Since then, the study of clientelism has gradually expanded and many recent analyses explore the consequences of clientelism. They often go in two directions: some studies investigate individuals to understand how clientelistic practices shape attitudes and behaviors, while other works focus on institutions and societies (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007; Stokes et al. 2013; Braidwood 2015; Bøggild 2016; Bøggild and Laustsen 2016; Corstange 2018; Nichter 2018; Nemčok et al. 2020; Tóth et al. 2020; Gherghina et al. 2021). Due mainly to its informal dimension, clientelism is one of those research topics in which appropriate data for investigation is often scarce and challenging. While data about formal institutional settings are easier to reach, most models of clientelism (Stokes 2005; Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007; Bratton 2008; Nichter 2008; Stokes et al. 2013; Gherghina and Volintiru 2017) are built mostly around institutional setup and tested with limited empirical evidence. Many comparative efforts quickly run into shortage of available empirical evidence and have a limited discussion about the variety of clientelistic strategies available worldwide. Some ways to overcome these challenges is through proxy data collected via expert surveys (Gherghina and Volintiru 2020; Yıldırım and Kitschelt 2020; Berens and RuthLovell 2021) or coordinated effort of many smaller case-oriented teams (Berenschot and Aspinall 2020). Reprinted from the journal

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Contributions and content of this special issue The special issue contributes to this burgeoning literature about the multi-faceted feature of electoral clientelism in three ways. First, at a theoretical level, this special issue starts with an article that investigates the complex relationship between distributive politics and clientelism, and emphasizes the thin line that separates them (Denemark 2020). Three other articles conceptualize electoral clientelism as a dynamic process that may take various forms in addition to the classic exchange of goods between patron and client covered by previous research. The conceptual differences are observable in various political settings: a case of administrative clientelism that may hinder policy reforms in Canada (Howlett and Rayner 2020), the relation of electoral clientelism with specific types of deprivation in Latin America (Berens and Ruth-Lovell 2021), or the centralization of electoral clientelism through personal networks in an African country (Mişcoiu and Kakdeu 2021). Second, the special issue enriches the methodological tools aimed at investigating clientelism. For example, the literature lacks indicators for the distribution of public resources by political parties when interacting with voters. This is partially addressed by several articles in this special issue in which clientelism can take the form of networks developed around one person (Mişcoiu and Kakdeu 2021), administrative personnel (Howlett and Rayner 2020), or electoral strategies (Saikkonen 2021). Related to consequences of clientelism, some works in this special issue suggest several methodological approaches that allow gauging the basic characteristics of expected clientelism. For example, one article using expert survey in combination with public opinion data indicates that the presence of clientelism increases the electoral support for parties with residualistic social policy platforms in the form of welfare state and redistribution (Berens and Ruth-Lovell 2021). Third, this special issue approaches clientelism from several perspectives and brings together substantive empirical evidence about the varieties of clientelism. The evidence included in this special issue comes from expert perceptions (Gherghina and Volintiru 2020; Berens and Ruth-Lovell 2021), political elite behavior (Denemark 2020; Howlett and Rayner 2020), users of clientelism (Mişcoiu and Kakdeu 2021), and election campaign data (Saikkonen 2021). The special issue combines contributions in the form of contextualized case studies (Australia, Canada, Cameroon, and Russia) with comparative perspectives across countries (Latin America, Eastern partnership countries). The articles in this special issue cover the occurrence of electoral clientelism at both local and national level. Their analyses about causes and consequences provide generalizable conclusions, which reflect the complex reality and enrich the empirical evidence for further studies. Although some cases have strong particularities, their findings point at broader phenomena in the region. For example, the study of Cameroon evolves around the specific types of formal and informal appointees of the country president (Mişcoiu and Kakdeu 2021) but the general clientelistic mechanism is applicable to other countries where the appointment system is linked to elected public office. The special issue starts with a theoretical discussion about clientelism and distributive politics. Denemark’s article refers to the basic features of clientelism as 5

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rooted on contingent exchanges of benefits that require monitoring and enforcement for their efficacy. These requirements determine a greater reliance on pork barrel politics and the distribution of state resources to influence voters. His work analyzes distributive politics in Australia’s party-based parliamentary system to compare the advantages and disadvantages of partisan pork barrel as an alternative to clientelism’s contingency-based distributive logic. In Australia, the ruling party has discretion over the distribution of public funds, but its actions remain susceptible to scandal from charges of bias and malfeasance. The clientelist and pork barrel models are compared in the context of the 1993 Labor sports Grants the 2004 Liberal-National Regional Partnerships Program grants. The second article looks at a specific type of distributive politics and illustrates how clientelism can prevent policy reforms. Howlett and Rayner use a case study of large-scale policy reform efforts in Integrated Land Management in Western Canada to show how clientelism can block efforts to enhance policy integration. So far, scholarship has focused extensively on the idea of replacing patchworks of public policies in specific issue areas with more coordinated or ‘integrated’ policy strategies. This article brings evidence about how the existence and resilience of pre-existing policy elements can lead to reform failures or sub-optimal outcomes. The next two articles zoom in the sources of clientelism and distinguish between centralized control of clientelism and local level development. In their article, Miscoiu and Kakdeu explore the topic of clientelism in Cameroon as a species of a wider phenomenon affecting Central and Western Francophone Africa. They outline the centralization of clientelism formed around the ‘Creatures’, who are the country president’s formal or informal appointees. They play the role of nodal elements that link the clientelistic chain to the central command. This happened at the expense of the locally dispersed and more autonomous clientelistic groups that were either included in or smashed by the pyramidal Creatures’ structures. Their findings indicate the existence of strong agents at central level who articulate clientelistic relationships and mobilize structures. Saikkonen analyzes clientelism from the opposite angle and seeks to understand the importance of the regional and local level in coordinating the machine politics that delivers it. Her article suggests that control over the local administration is an important variable that shapes the effectiveness of authoritarian machine politics in Russia. The results highlight the importance of subnational political hierarchies and the local political setting in coordinating electoral manipulation. In the specific political context of this single-case study, the regional political machines were mostly non-partisan. The final two contributions complement Saikkonen’s approach with comparative analysis aiming to how political parties and electoral clientelism. The article written by Gherghina and Volintiru builds on earlier findings according to which political parties are key promoters and users of clientelism in many political settings. They investigate the extent to which some party-related features are more conducive to clientelism than others. Their analysis uses an original expert survey conducted for 15 parties in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine in 2018. The results indicate that parties’ territorial coverage, notoriety of the leader and private funding are important sources for clientelism, with important variations between the investigated countries. Reprinted from the journal

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In their article, Berens and Ruth-Lovell analyze the extent to which clientelism hollows out support for welfare progressivity in Latin America. They study how far clientelism stabilizes residualistic social policies by distorting patterns of representation and by substantiating a renunciation of state administered programs among the better-off. Their key argument is that clientelism can distort the link between the vested interest of low-income earners and redistributive policies so that the poor support parties with a residualistic social policy agenda. Consequently, clientelistic parties gain greater leverage to pursue liberal social policies by paying off the poor in return for their vote. The analysis combines information on party strategies from an expert survey with public opinion data for Latin America. It shows that clientelistic practices have an impact on the electoral support for political parties which promote a liberal welfare state. These contributions to the special issue illustrate that political actors make use of electoral clientelism to maintain or gain access to positions of power. The various forms of electoral clientelism are not traceable only in democracies, but they apply to a much wider variety of political regimes. Even though the theories of democracy normatively reject the idea of clientelism as a flaw of representative government, future research must acknowledge that clientelistic practices are internal to the functioning of political systems. It is no longer sufficient to formulate prior research expectations in a way that the findings would solely confirm or reject the presence of electoral clientelism. Instead, empirical research could take a step forward and address more practically oriented topics proposing institutional designs and effective policies with a potential to diminish the practices of electoral clientelism. The contributions to this special issue outline several forms of clientelism that were not explored by previous studies. Further research could build on these and seek to elaborate definitions of clientelism that include these forms or develop a typology that can reunite them together with other forms. The articles included in this special issue provide an encompassing map of electoral clientelism, an analysis of potential causes and consequences, and thus provide a useful foundation for the next step suggested above. Funding  Sergiu Gherghina’s work for this article was supported through a project funded by the Romanian Executive Agency for Higher Education, Research, Development and Innovation Funding (UEFISCDI), Project Number: PN-III-P1-1.1-TE-2019-0460.

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Acta Politica (2021) 56:600–621 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-020-00172-6 ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Clientelism and distributive politics in Australia: comparing partisan pork barrel with contingency‑based vote‑buying David Denemark1  Published online: 22 June 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020

Abstract Clientelism’s traditional direct, contingency-based system of patrons using private finance to pursue vote-buying continues to be of significance in countries around the world. However, the rise of secret ballots, civil service protocols for public employment, and fiscal restrictions have all limited its efficacy as a tool of electoral influence, especially in modern, advanced democracies. This has promoted new, indirect variants of clientelism, in which state resources are provided to contractors in return for the finances necessary to buy votes and affect voter mobilization. Ultimately, despite these new formulations, clientelism remains premised on contingent exchanges of benefits that require monitoring and enforcement for their efficacy. These requirements have fuelled an increasing reliance on pork barrel politics and the distribution of state resources as a way to influence votes without the need for clientelism’s system of contingency-based transfers and monitoring. This paper examines distributive politics in Australia’s party-based parliamentary system and its unique compulsory voting requirement as a way to compare the strategic advantages and disadvantages of partisan pork barrel as an alternative to clientelism’s contingency-based distributive logic. Because Australia’s ruling party controls executive power and has discretion over the distribution of public funds, there are significant incentives to use the public purse for maximum electoral effect, though the possibility of scandal from charges of bias and malfeasance, as with clientelism, remains a threat. The assumptions of the clientelist and pork barrel models are compared in the context of two Australian pork barrel programs: 1993 Labor sports grants; and 2004 Liberal-National Regional Partnerships Program grants. Keywords  Clientelism · Distributive politics · Pork barrel · Australia · Vote-buying

* David Denemark [email protected] 1



Political Science and International Relations, University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia

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Introduction Clientelism and pork barrel at their most fundamental level may be seen as variations of exchange-based distributive politics. As with any system of political influence, both of these models reflect a range of incentives and disincentives—a number of them held in common—that political actors face in attempting to secure political support and the perks of office. They diverge, however, in several of the key mechanisms they utilize to effect maximum impact on voter intentions and behaviour from the resources they distribute. This paper, against the backdrop of Australia’s partybased parliamentary system, its strict regulation of public employment, and its use of secret ballots and compulsory voting, examines the commonalities and distinctions of these two models when considered in the context of two Australian pork barrel schemes and electoral dynamics. Overall, as we will see, despite increasingly blurred distinctions between the distributive processes of these two models, and the rise of hybrid fusions of clientelist exchanges and pork barrel largesse, pork barrel’s reliance on non-contingent distributions of public resources frees it from much of clientelism’s requirement for the monitoring and enforcement of individual transactions and voters’ promised support. In addition, pork barrel’s direct use of public resources to affect vote outcomes avoids some of clientelism’s need to accrue private finances through deals with contractors, thus sidestepping the concessions necessary to meet their demands (see Gherghina and Volintiru 2017; p.116; Elliott 2011, p.49). Both models of distributive politics, though, despite several important distinctions in the mechanisms of accountability they utilize, rely on the provision of rewards to those who can promote their political fortunes. And, in the end, like clientelism and its unscrupulous schemes to buy voter mobilization or electoral support, pork barrel’s use of taxpayer funds to influence electoral outcomes is vulnerable to public disapproval and the loss of the voter support it seeks to secure. Australia’s parliamentary system of party-based governance promotes a distinctively collective form of distributive benefits that enables the party-in-government to use taxpayer monies to secure victory in key marginal seats, lest everyone in the incumbent party face three years on the opposition benches for having lost a handful of seats. This creates a strong “vertical”, or top-down, orientation to the distributive process, in which senior party figures, who also control the nation’s parliamentary executive, are responsible for determining where best to place distributive resources in order to affect the electorate (Gherghina and Volintiru 2017, pp. 117, 118; Auerbach 2016, p. 119)—not the local candidate or party patron. Despite this centralist strategic focus, however, the incumbent party must ultimately convey a simple “we deliver” message at the local level to, especially, the millions of voters in Australia who, though largely uninterested in electoral politics, are compelled by law to vote on Election Day. The resultant “exchange” in Australian pork barrel is not clientelism’s direct, contingent system of enforceable, excludable individual rewards, but rather an implicit exchange for public resources, in which the party-in-government calculates which geographic and political constituencies are most likely to yield local-level vote gains amongst, primarily, the nation’s least interested, but most malleable voters. 11

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All told, as we will see, though pork barrel shares a number of important elements with clientelism that have served to blur the boundary between the two models, it has a distinctive form that provides several advantages in modern systems of governance, where secret ballots and meritocratic systems of employment limit direct, enforceable forms of electoral vote influencing. These comparisons bring into sharp relief a variety of assumptions about these two approaches to distributive politics, and the motivations and incentives that propel them.

Clientelism: the commitment problem in a contingency model of distributive politics The traditional model of clientelism revolves around a direct, exchange-based system of distributive politics premised on a single, fundamental precept: the client’s receipt of a reward is contingent on the delivery to the patron of promised or realized political support (Stokes 2013, p. 2). This, as Hicken argues, involves a strictly quidpro-quo relationship in which the targeted distribution of goods “always comes with strings attached” (2011, p. 291). Employing “diverse portfolios of strategies” (GansMorse et al. 2014, p. 417) clientelism has proven to be an adaptive system, distributing a wide array of resources, including jobs, welfare, in-kind gifts and money (Elliott 2011, p. 49; Piattoni 2001) through direct, contingent exchanges (Gans-Morse et al. 2014, p. 415; Wantchekon 2003, p. 400). While evident in all forms of political systems, including modern democracies, a number of studies have shown that clientelism is most prevalent in poor countries due to their typically permeable state governmental apparatuses, which allow political entrepreneurs to parlay contingent exchanges of services and material benefits for electoral advantage (Corstange 2018, p. 81; Elliott 2011, p. 51; Keefer 2007, p. 804; Lindberg 2010). Clientelist politics have also been shown to flourish in “middle-income” democracies undergoing the early stages of political stability and organizational predictability (Kitschelt and Kselman 2012, p. 1457), as this nascent systematizing of institutional authority makes these exchanges of political largesse less capricious. However, the development of “a truly well-established administrative apparatus” and the rise of regularized systems of governance and economic activities in more advanced societies promote programmatic politics and its non-excludable resources, while eroding the direct forms of clientelism’s targeted, contingent benefits (Kitschelt and Kselman 2012, p. 1462). Similarly, the institutionalization of meritocratic mechanisms such as the civil service for apportioning public employment serves to stymy the contingent exchange of political resources for votes (Stokes 2013, p. 17; Robinson and Verdier 2013, pp.263, 264), while the adoption of secret ballots makes the targeting and enforcement of vote-buying all but impossible (Vicente 2014, p. F357; Kramon 2016, p. 459). Thus, as Finan and Schechter emphasize, clientelism in advanced democracies is intrinsically undermined by the “double commitment problem”. That is, because “votes are unobservable and a politician’s promises are unenforceable… there is no formal way to contract for votes in an election” (2012, p. 877). Reprinted from the journal

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In short, as systems of governance become regularized vehicles of both the electoral process and the programmatic distribution of non-excludable resources, the utility of direct, contingent clientelist politics is weakened (Robinson and Verdier 2013, p. 264). In response, clientelism has been argued to assume a more complex, “bi-dimensional” form (Ghergina and Volintiru 2017, pp. 115–119). Here, the “horizontal” accrual of exogenous finances by peddling state resources and policy access to contractors becomes a core clientelist activity (Das and Maiorano 2019, p. 240), while the “vertical” control of these externally sourced funds to buy votes or influence the mobilization of turnout becomes a more nearly derivative enterprise—each dimension, though, providing political patrons with vital strategic assets (Ghergina and Volintiru 2017, p. 116; Auerbach 2016, p.119). This, as will see next, begins to blur the distinction between clientelism and pork barrel politics, as both depend on parlaying state policy influence and resources for political gain, and each is premised on exchanges of goods and services in the pursuit of electoral support (see Samuels 2002, pp. 845, 846, 851; Ghergina and Volintiru pp. 122, 123). Despite pork barrel politics’ distinctive reliance on the distribution of nonexcludable, programmatic public resources to collective recipients who may or may not reciprocate with their political support, recent studies of clientelism have shown that patron/client exchanges rely less and less on direct, contingent transfers of rewards to individual voters, and instead prioritize the collective provision of benefits, including state resources, to groups that are critical for the party’s support base, including unions, clubs and allied political organizations.1 This, it is argued, promotes the hybridization of pork and clientelism by obscuring the boundary between these two forms of distributive politics (Stokes et al. 2013). As Weitz-Shapiro (2012, p. 569) reminds us, “the process required to create almost any public good embeds many private goods within it, some of which may be distributed via the contingent direct exchange that is the hallmark of clientelism”. In short, the distribution of group-based, programmatic goods central to pork barrel politics inevitably involves elements of clientelistic rewards, which, in its collective form, loses much of clientelism’s characteristic premise of enforceable, contingent exchange. Clientelism’s increasing focus on group-based support is especially evident in modern democracies (Weitz-Shapiro 2012, p. 569), and regularly involves parties distributing benefits to their support base, precisely because the reliance on loyalists sidesteps the difficulty of imposing strict, quid-pro-quo contingency systems on more generalized groups of non-partisan voters (Gans-Morse et al. 2014, p.418; Finan and Shechter 2012, p. 871). It also reflects the fact that a significant proportion of the population in modern societies receives benefits from the non-excludable resources of governmental programs (Elliot 2011, p. 48), thereby limiting the pool of voters open to the lure of clientelist rewards. Thus, despite these new roles involving provisions of state resources to contractors, the increasing blurring of the boundaries between clientelist and pork barrel mechanisms, and the increasingly collective pursuit of political support, it remains the case that the clientelist enterprise ultimately remains reliant on the influencing 1

  See, for example, (Gans-Morse et al. 2014, p. 418; Albertus 2013; Kramon 2016, pp. 454–456).

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of votes or voter mobilization, and thus susceptible to the problems of exchangebased transactions and the logic of commitment, monitoring and enforcement that are required to assure value for money. As Weitz-Shapiro summarizes, clientelist exchange “relies on a voter’s belief that her behaviour at the ballot box may be monitored and her fear that her individual voting decision may result in material gains or losses” (2012, p. 569). It is these fundamental roles of contingent exchange that make clientelism distinctive from pork barrel distributive politics (Golden and Min 2013, p.77; Auerbach 2016, p. 119). Thus, clientelism’s contingent relationship with voters affords, as Stokes (2005) argues, a type of “perverse accountability” in which politicians are able to hold voters to their promises, rather than voters holding their elected representatives to account. However, given the cost and organizational complexity of keeping voters true to their promises (Elliott 2011, p. 495; Weitz-Shapiro 2012, p. 569), political actors have incentives to pursue alternative means for influencing the vote that are less predicated on the enforcement of material exchange for votes. Instead, political actors may well turn to pork barrel’s strategic distribution of non-excludable state resources to those constituencies, both geographic and political, that look most likely to provide the votes essential for victory, and trust their strategists to distribute these material benefits for best effect (Kitschelt 2000, p. 850). Parliamentary pork barrel, as we will see, by focusing on the collective distribution of governmental resources, means that its distributive model has, by necessity, a more nearly vertical, hierarchical orientation, as only those in control of the state’s finances and regulatory processes can marshal those programmatic resources for electoral gain. As a consequence, Australia’s party-based parliamentary system, despite being populated by parties with declining memberships and electioneering budgets, affords its incumbents with significant opportunities to apportion taxpayerfunded resources for electoral advantage. Clientelism: core vs. swing voters and the commitment problem Clientelism’s exchange of rewards or benefits for political support has historically been premised on a direct relationship between political patrons and clients who are well known to the patrons—forming a bedrock base of predictable support, so long as voters and political actors are true to their promises. In traditional political systems, this relationship tends to be based on well-established links between voters and either the patron or broker (See Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007), while avoiding one-off distributions of resources to unknown clients, especially swing voters, who are seen as the most likely to undermine the certainty of commitment on which the relationship rests, by reneging on their commitment (Golden and Min 2013, pp. 78, 79; Albertus 2013, p. 1083). In more modern societies, veritable pyramids of broker machines dispense the patron’s largesse and monitor and enforce voters’ support (Gans-Morse et al. 2014, p. 415). Thus, the “commitment problem” central to clientelism, and the difficulty of strictly monitoring voters’ and politicians’ promises, means that patrons are often tempted to use their resources to maximize votes amongst “core constituents” Reprinted from the journal

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(Corstange 2018, p. 79; Dixit and Londregan 1996) and not try to secure new votes from the ranks of uncommitted or swing voters in less well-canvassed constituencies (Cox and McCubbins 1986; Carlin and Moseley 2015, p. 15; Nichter 2008). In this respect, in systems in which it is a strategic priority to maximize votes and their stability, parties may well focus their vote bribing on territorial strongholds in order to satisfy two key priorities: to maintain the loyalty of their own partisan strongholds and to prevent the leaching of support by swing voters to party opponents in times of electoral flux (Gherghina 2013, pp. 146, 147). Bribing party loyalists may also prompt fiscal returns in the form of campaign contributions that would be unlikely from swing voters, thus providing vital funds for electoral activities and advertising—keys to the more orthodox securing of the support of undecided voters on Election Day. However, in parliamentary electoral systems such as Australia’s, where the party with the most local constituency MPs forms the government, the generalized maximization of votes and maintenance of larger majorities is strategically superfluous, while the securing of even slender majorities in handfuls of marginal seats is vital, and often makes the difference between retaining governmental power and being relegated to the opposition benches. In short, in these sorts of electoral systems, as core supporters are the most likely to be loyal already to the patron’s party, and the most likely to turn out to vote in non-compulsory systems, the short-term placement of campaign resources into strongholds of loyalists will often mean the patron’s resources are largely wasted (Stokes 2013, p. 12).2 All told, then, in electoral systems like Australia’s, which uses compulsory voting to prompt the near total turnout of the nation’s electorate on Election Day, voter mobilization is a pointless endeavour. At the same time, because governments are formed from the party with the most seats in the House of Representatives, catering to a party’s core supporters would, in most cases, necessitate making appeals to constituency strongholds, which are likely concentrated in safe seats, and thus a waste of clientelist resources (Stokes 2013, p. 12). Clientelist schemes, then, that seek to obviate the “commitment problem” by boosting the margin of victory in safe seats provide little of strategic value to party-controlled governments, such as in Australia. At the same time, any attempt to minimize exchange-reneging by targeting party loyalists in marginal seats is also likely to prove fruitless, as it would mean pursuing vote gains from voters whose party loyalties are all but certain to be firmly in the incumbent party’s tally.

2   There are electoral systems in which maximizing the party vote nationwide is a strategic priority. New Zealand’s Mixed Member Proportional system, for example, gives voters two ballots—one for their local MP and one for party lists of candidates. The latter is used to elect the MPs necessary to effect parties’ overall national proportionality in parliament, making vote maximization a vital priority, irrespective of the seats in which the party votes are cast. An additional benefit of this distributive focus on party strongholds, as Gherghina (2013) emphasizes, is that these resources are likely to preclude inroads being made into the support base by other parties targeting swing voters in these areas. Thus, unlike in purely First-Past-the-Post electoral systems, parties in New Zealand have reason to maximize their list vote tally where it is most easily done—parties’ stronghold seats, where party figures are best known and local party loyalty fuels high turnout (see Denemark 1996).

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Overall, the utility of the exchange-based reward mechanism central to clientelism is intrinsically constrained by the likelihood of patrons and voters reneging on their promises. It is further undermined when parties must contend with electoral rules that make it strategically pointless to funnel resources to those voters who are most likely to honour their commitment, but represent little strategic significance to the election outcome. As a result, in nations, such as Australia, that have significant levels of partisan loyalty amongst its voters, and also have implemented the secret ballot, a civil service system for public employment and imposed legal restrictions on clientelism, parties have significant incentives to turn to other mechanisms of distributive politics. Perhaps foremost amongst these alternatives is pork barrel, which is designed to influence the vote without the need for a direct exchange of rewards, and may well provide a locally evident inducement to voters with low levels of political interest to vote for the incumbent party.

Australian Parliamentary pork barrel: marginal seats and partisan control in a non‑contingency model of distributive politics Given the organizational impediments, legal restrictions and fiscal constraints outlined thus far, clientelism can be seen as of limited utility to parties in countries like Australia. On the other hand, however, several factors provide Australian ruling parties with the incentives and means to implement partisan pork barrel as a way to influence the vote. One of the most important amongst these factors is Australia’s system of compulsory voting, which forces the electoral participation of millions of low-interested voters (see McAllister and Cameron 2014, pp. 8, 33). Compulsory voting has been argued to reduce clientelist vote-buying because the expansion of the electorate makes vote-buying more expensive, while turnout buying and abstention buying are rendered superfluous by legally prescribing universal turnout on Election Day (see Schaffer 2008, p. 124; Gans-Morse et al. 2014, p. 425). Because these grudging members of the electorate pay virtually no attention to national politics and traditional campaign news coverage, they must be enticed with distinctively straightforward campaign appeals and with localized distributive politics (see Denemark 2002, pp. 645–665, 670–671, 2005, pp. 397–398; Denemark et al. 2007, p. 90). This is evident in the distinctly different engagement with politics and national elections for those who would and those who would not vote if it was not compulsory in Australia. Indeed, correlation analysis shows that those who would not have voted in the 2016 Australian federal election held significantly lower levels of interest in politics generally and watched significantly lower levels of election campaign TV news reports than respondents who said they would have voted in the election, even if not compelled to do so.3 All told, then, Australia’s compulsory voting laws can be seen as compelling millions of reluctant participants into the electoral process—voters who are largely

3

  Pearson correlation coefficient .38/2-tailed significance .01; Pearson correlation coefficient .23/2-tailed significance .01. See the 2016 Australian Election Study (McAllister et al. 2017).

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disinterested in the election and who pay little or no attention to national news summaries of the election campaign. Their votes, unanchored by political predispositions and largely uninformed by the campaign’s formal issue and policy debates, represent a rich prospect for those whose job is to assemble winning margins on Election Day. All but oblivious to the appeals of national campaigns, they seem especially susceptible to the localized allure of pork barrel resources being distributed to their home constituency. It is an important element in the strategic arsenal of Australian campaign strategists that has was once again employed in the 2019 federal election—$100 million dollars of constituency-level handouts, drawing an auditor general’s investigation, significant media coverage, widespread controversy and the resignation of the Minister responsible (see Auditor-General 2020). Parliamentary pork barrel: partisan power and vertical control Important for the current discussion is the significant role played by political parties in Australia’s system of national governance, which fuses governmental executive authority with partisan power (Denemark 2000, p. 896). More specifically, the ruling party’s cabinet is both the nation’s governing executive—responsible for the formulation of all legislation and for all discretionary spending—and the party’s senior parliamentary elite. This marriage of governmental authority with party power provides the party-in-government with a decidedly “vertical” authority structure, and with it, the means to apportion governmental resources in ways that maximize targeted partisan vote gain—an alluring incentive to use the public purse for best electoral effect. Parliamentary pork barrel, of course, is a one-sided game. Opposition parties, with no formal executive power of their own, have no access to the distribution of state resources in this system, and are limited to criticizing and using parliamentary channels to challenge the pork projects of the incumbent party. In short, parliamentary systems provide a lopsided set of distributive benefits that all but wholly exclude non-governing parties from the apportionment of public resources—grants, programs and public works—to key geographic and electorate constituencies. The fortunate members of the incumbent parties-in-government, as a consequence, command an important, non-contingency-based mechanism for influencing the vote.4 Nonetheless, despite this institutionalized advantage, as we will see, the pork barrel distributive model comes with its own set of barriers and disincentives that serve both to mould the way it is implemented, and to restrict its overall impact. Australian cabinet ministers are the apex executive officers of the government and are vested with final, discretionary power over the programs implemented within their ministerial portfolio. And, because the government sinks or swims depending on its ability to retain a majority of seats at the next election, there are significant

4   In Australia, all government spending involves an element of discretion by the cabinet minister responsible for the money or program involved. Here, I will focus on government spending allocated wholly within geographic constituencies and dispensed in the months in the lead-up to a federal election. See Denemark 2000, footnote 2, p. 898.

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incentives for government ministers to apportion governmental resources to their own party, and especially their marginal seats. The loss of a few marginal seats may cost the ruling party its mantle of government—and relegate every government minister along with all their party caucus members, to the opposition benches. In short, the Australian system provides both the incentive and means to use governmental assets for best partisan electoral effect. Indeed, the fate of each member of the ruling party can be seen to depend on the vertical authority structure and collective endeavours of their party’s executive and its command of the nation’s public resources—both for the orthodox legislative purposes of implementing the government’s program, and for underwriting the less orthodox schemes of pork barrel in pursuit of vital slivers of votes at the next election. Partisan pork barrel: limits and constraints If the power and capabilities of incumbent parties are significant, there are also important limitations on their ability to apportion public funds for partisan gain. One of the most important of these constraints on the ability of partisan pork barrel to affect the electoral fortunes of the local MP is the difficulty that local members have in claiming singular responsibility for the governmental resources allocated to their constituency (see Lancaster and Patterson 1990, p. 461; also see Samuels 2002, p. 848). As all expenditure is in fact authorized by the responsible cabinet minister, the role played by the local MP may look—and be—incidental. Nonetheless, as a locally evident asset, geared to the needs of that constituency, the local MP can always claim that it was his or her influence in the parliamentary party, or over the responsible minister, that secured the resource to their seat. True or not, the MP has every reason to lay claim to the apportionment of vital resources to their constituency. Another important constraint on the strategic impact of pork barrel distributive politics is its inability, unlike with clientelism, to monitor and enforce the acquisition of votes in exchange for the outlay of resources in targeted electoral districts. That is, because Australia’s ballots are secret, the incumbent party must depend not on brokers and enforcers to assure vote gain in return for distributed assets. Rather, the impact of Australian distributive politics must be gauged by pre-election survey research, whose purpose is to determine which seats have both narrow margins and significant numbers of the disinterested voters, and are susceptible to pork barrel’s implicit messages of governmental concern for constituency well-being. As almost all of pork barrel funds are apportioned before the election, there can be no clientelist-type withholding of benefits contingent on vote-support being given on Election Day. Finally, it is important to note that the key strategic purpose of the apportionment of pork barrel resources is to convey to voters a sense that the party-in-government “cares” and “delivers” for constituents. This is not always dictated by the need to secure the votes of swing voters in marginal seats. As we will see, incumbent parties may target a number of alternative priorities, including using pork barrel funds to assure supporters of a governing coalition’s junior member that they have not been Reprinted from the journal

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forgotten by the dominant major party and its legislative and fiscal objectives. Similarly, party-in-government strategists may use distributive assets to try to dampen insurgent moves on key seats by independent candidates, who might otherwise rob a coalition government of that vital set of seats. In short, pork barrel politics, though perhaps most frequently assigned the task of securing vital votes in marginal seats, may be deployed to perform a variety of alternative tasks—each, though, sharing the common quest: to show that the governing parties “care” about constituent needs and concerns, and can “deliver” the goods to address them. Thus, pork barrel distributive politics in parliamentary systems can be seen as a strategically designed system of resource distribution whose implicit “exchange” is an increase in support for the incumbent party. In that sense, clientelism and pork barrel may both be seen as examples of “exchange-based distributive politics”. At the same time, however, there are a number of factors that make these two distributive systems distinctive. Important amongst these factors is pork barrel’s lack of a system of direct-exchange mechanisms to monitor and enforce the desired vote gains. Instead, government funds and programs are apportioned to those electoral districts deemed vital for the incumbent party to secure the seat numbers necessary for retaining government at the next election. It is the party’s survey analysts and electoral campaign strategists who design, implement and gauge the impact of the pork barrel logistics charged with securing key margins of votes deemed essential for victory. The reward or benefit of pork barrel politics, then, is not contingent on promised or delivered votes. Rather, it is a pre-election inducement designed, often in the simplest of ways, to convey the message that the party-in-government cares about the voters in the electoral constituencies targeted for the distribution of funds.

Summary: clientelism v. partisan pork barrel politics All told, we can see that partisan pork barrel distributive politics shares with clientelism the apportionment of benefits as an essential strategic inducement for voter support. Both regard voters as seducible by these rewards, and the progenitors of both systems know they must be wary of the repercussions of being found violating the law or political ethics. But beyond this comparability of the basic logic of money for votes, we can see several important distinctions in the way the distributive mechanisms pursue their prey. Perhaps most importantly, clientelism is premised on the provision of a rewards to voters being strictly contingent on the voters promising or providing voter support for the patron, which necessitate clientelist parties and their brokers undertaking systems to monitor and enforce the voters’ honouring of the terms of exchange. The apportionment of pork barrel goods, on the other hand, is the product of a strategic calculus of the likelihood of which votes in which seats can be attracted by the provision of constituency-level public funds or programs, designed to convey to local voters that the local MP, and by extension the ruling party, “delivers the goods” and deserves support. No direct electoral enforcement is possible. Indeed, the efficacy of the exchange lies wholly in the electoral outcome—ex post facto research being relied on to show whether vote gain was realized in the constituencies where pork 19

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funds were allocated. As with clientelism, however, ruling parties must be careful in allocating taxpayer-funded resources in a way that disproportionately provides benefits to their own party’s seats and voters, lest they open themselves to charges of “vote-buying” and thereby undermine voters’ trust. It is a fine line that parties-ingovernment must tread. These strategic goals and impediments are briefly explored next in two Australian pork barrel case studies.

Data and methods This analysis examines two Australian pork barrel programs as a way to highlight the incentives and disincentives, and the strategic utility and constraints in pursuing partisan pork barrel politics in a parliamentary system. The distinctive differences of these benefits and limitations will be used to contrast key elements of the pork barrel and direct, contingency-based clientelist models, outlined above. The first of these pork barrel studies analyses $A29.5 million of funds distributed through 726 constituency-level sports grants by the Australian Labor government in the lead-up to the 13 March 1993 Australian federal election, details of which were derived from an appendix to an unpublished report by the auditor-general.5 The second pork barrel study explores $A95 million in grants apportioned in the lead-up to the 9 October 2004 federal election (and a total of $A104.8 million by the end of 2004), as part of the Liberal/National Government’s Regional Partnerships Program, which funded a variety of community and regional projects in rural and regional communities across the nation.6

5

  These 1993 grants were allocated through the Community Recreational and Sporting Facilities Program and designed to improve or establish sporting facilities or programs in the communities funded. Data were derived from an appendix to an auditor-general’s audit report to the House of Representatives, submitted in November 1993. The details of the grants were in the report to the Parliament, but not included in the subsequent published document, “Audit Report No. 9, 1993–1994; Efficiency Audit of the Community Cultural, Recreational and Sporting Facilities Program” (1993). The grants totaled 726 from the total of 2800 lodged with the government, and were approved by Ros Kelly, MP, Minister for the Environment, Sport and Territories. See Denemark 2000 for complete details). 6   These 478 RPP grants, totalling $A95 million in grants distributed by Election Day in 2004 (and a total of 503 grants and $104.8 million distributed by 31 December 2004), were allocated as part of the Liberal/Nationals Government’s 2004 Regional Partnerships Program, and apportioned at the discretion John Anderson, Nationals Leader and Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Transport and Regional Services, or Jim Lloyd, Liberal MP and Federal Minister for Regional Services and Local Government. These grants were designed to foster community access to services in regional communities with populations of less than 5,000. Details of the grants derive from a Senate inquiry reported to Parliament on 15 August 2005, “Finance and Public Administration Reference Committee, Requested Information on Sustainable Regions: Approved Regional Partnerships Program Projects as at 31 December 2004. See Denemark 2014 for details.

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Analysis and discussion Labor sports grants Faced with the prospect of an especially close general election in 1993, the Australian Labor Government allocated $A29.5 million for distribution to locallevel sports facilities and programs in the months preceding the March 13 Election Day. Approved by Ros Kelly, the Labor Minister for Sport, the Environment and Territories, these funds for local community sports and recreation projects were publically argued by the Government to have been apportioned purely on the basis of community need. However, at the request of the Coalition parties in opposition, the Australian auditor-general conducted an investigation into the extent to which these pre-election funds were distributed disproportionately to Labor-held seats, and focused on marginal seats. The auditor-general, in a report to Parliament, found that the Labor Government had indeed used the grants for both of these electoral priorities. Labor, for its part, conceded that it apportioned more of the grant money to its own seats, but argued this was because Labor represents mostly working-class and low-income Australians, and as the purpose of the sports grants was to support applications that demonstrated “community need”, Labor strenuously contended that though the support went primarily to Labor seats, it did so justifiably, and any seeming partisan bias was coincidental (see Denemark 2000, p. 912). In the end, as no selection criteria for “community need” were ever publically released by the Labor Government, it remained procedurally free to apportion these funds to its own districts, and contend, at least, that it was not acting with bias or political motivation in its distributive scheme. Nonetheless, the Labor Government attracted significant negative news coverage and widespread condemnation for presiding over what had become nearly universally known as the “Sports Rorts” affair. This high-profile negativity underscores the potential hazards of pork barrel distributive politics relying on taxpayer-funded programs to promote the party-in-government’s own benefit. While ruling parties have a clear incentive to use public funds for their exclusive advantage, voters are wary of parliamentary parties misusing tax dollars for their own gain—and can turn an incumbent advantage into a decidedly disadvantageous liability if the scandal gets sufficient media coverage to stir voters’ wrath. Direct, contingency-based clientelism, on the other hand, by relying a more secretive distributive process, is less likely to suffer the debilitating national scandals that pork barrel politics can fuel, as its secretive exchanges are often more difficult to establish. A close look at the sums and distributive patterns of the 1993 Labor Sports Grants program provides evidence wholly consistent with Labor having used this pork barrel scheme to maximize its own electoral advantage. Labor’s apportionment of these funds, however, was done in two distinctly different ways, with, it seems clear, two wholly different electoral priorities guiding the targeting of these public resources. Figure 1 reports the total grant dollars distributed to seats held by the Australian Labor party and to those held by the Liberal/National 21

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Non-ALP Seats 9,703,991 / 33%

19,641,688 / 67% ALP Seats

Fig. 1  Sum of 1993 sports grants in ALP and non-ALP seats. Source: Unpublished attachment to Auditor-General’s Report no. 9, 1993–1994: Efficiency Audit, Community Cultural, Recreational and Sporting Facilities Program. Figures are total grant dollars within electoral divisions controlled by the Australian Labor Party (ALP) or the Liberal/National Opposition before the 1993 election. (see Denemark 2000, p. 902)

Mean Grant

$400,000 $300,000 $200,000

Seats Held $100,000

Non-ALP

$0

ALP

0% 5. -2 .5 5% 22 -22. .0 .0% 20 -20 .5 .5% 17 -17 .0 .0% 15 -15 .5 % 12 2.5 -1 % 10 10.0 57. .5% 7 05. .0% 5 52. 5% 2. 0-

Seat Marginality Fig. 2  Mean 1993 sports grants in ALP and non-ALP seats by marginality of seats. Source: Unpublished attachment to Auditor-General’s Report no. 9, 1993–1994: Efficiency Audit, Community Cultural, Recreational and Sporting Facilities Program. Figures are the mean grant size within electoral divisions controlled by the ALP or the Liberal/National Opposition before the 1993 election. Marginality categories are 2-party preferred swing required to lose the seat in 1993. (See Denemark 2000, p. 904)

Party coalition. As the auditor-general showed in his report, the Labor Government assigned just over two-thirds of the funds overall to seats held by members of its own party, the remaining one-third going to seats controlled by the Liberal/ National Party. In short, as we would expect, the party-in-government succumbed to the temptation to put the bulk of these grants into community projects in their own members’ electoral districts. Figure  2 reports the mean size of 1993 sports grants apportioned to Labor and to Coalition seats of varying levels of electoral marginality. Because the Australian Reprinted from the journal

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Clientelism and distributive politics in Australia: comparing…

system is premised on partisan government, determined by which party secures the most seats in the House of Representatives, pork barrel politics can be expected to prioritize the maximization of votes in key, marginal seats, where even minimal vote gains may secure their victory. And, indeed, the patterns of grant distribution in Fig. 2 show that the Labor Government in 1993 apportioned appreciably larger grants to their most marginal seats, and to the Coalition’s most marginal seats than it did for seats with safer electoral margins. Curiously, only those Labor seats with very safe pre-election vote margins of 17.5–20.0%, and Opposition seats in the safest category of 22.5–25% received grants of approximately the same size as those in the most marginal seats. Given the strategic imperative to influence the outcome in “winnable” seats with the smallest margins separating the parties, the placing of significant sums into safe seats seems to violate Labor’s electoral priorities. However, faced with the near certainty of challenges to its use of public resources for its own exclusive advantage, the Labor Government had a significant incentive to apportion some of its funds to the Opposition parties, in order to short circuit their arguments of wholesale bias. At the same time, Labor had a strategic imperative to prevent the bulk of funds going to the Opposition’s marginal seats, which might undermine their efforts to win those seats. The distribution of significant funds to the very safest Opposition seats solves this strategic conundrum. While it apportions substantial sums of money to the Opposition, it places resources into divisions that historically have had essentially no chance of a Labor victory, thus defusing their overall electoral impact (Denemark 2000, pp. 903–905; Gaunt 1999). The assigning of significant sums to Labor’s own safest seats also runs counter to the calculus of putting resources into seats that can either be secured from the ranks of the Opposition or safeguarded from loss on Election Day. Here, the most likely explanation is that Labor put sizeable amounts of Sport Grants funding into safe seats primarily controlled by the party’s own cabinet elite. As high-profile ministers, many with daunting portfolio responsibilities, they could also reasonably argue that they must spend most of their time in the nation’s capital working on portfolio duties, and have precious little time to spend on constituency affairs (Bowler et al. 1996, pp. 465–466; Studlar and McAllister 1996, p. 81). A local sports grant, then, could be argued to provide an important gesture of good will to voters in ministers’ seats, and convey their ongoing concern for local community, as well as national, concerns (see Denemark 2000, pp. 907–909). Cabinet ministers, as the parliamentary party’s highest ranking members, could also contend that protecting their electoral profile is important to the reputation of those who were most likely to be the party’s national leaders in the years to come. The inevitable public outcry and negative media coverage about the “Sports Rorts” affair serve to underscore that pork barrel, like clientelism, has pitfalls as well as advantages. The use of public resources is a form of distributive politics in modern democracies that is advantageous in that it avoids the need for clientelism’s direct-exchange enforcement mechanisms, and the dangers of getting caught, at least directly, distributing “money for votes”. Pork barrel also obviates the inherent difficulties of gauging whether voters honoured their commitment, given the opacity of Australia’s secret ballots, which protect the privacy of the votes cast by its citizens. 23

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Nonetheless, as with clientelism’s direct system of buying votes, the distribution of public funds to maximize the vote in the nation’s key seats and constituencies, and to protect the party profile of its own elite, must be seen as a system of exchangebased distributive politics in its own right, with its own potential for significant public backlash. We will see this again in the next section, which explores a second example of Australian pork barrel, this time implemented by the Coalition, and countered by the indignant outcry of a Labor opposition. Coalition regional partnerships program grants Having won the 1996 Australian federal election, ending 13 years of Labor Government, the Liberal/Nationals Coalition assumed the mantle of executive parliamentary power, and with it ministerial discretion over the distribution of government resources. It immediately began to formulate its own programs of constituency-level grants, including the Natural Heritage Trust scheme, which was deployed in the lead-up to the 1998 federal election (see Denemark 1998), and then the Regional Partnerships Program (RPP), which involved distributing $A95 million in regional and community grants in the lead-up to the 9 October 2004 federal election, and a total of $104.8 million by 31 December 2004. The 2004 RPP is used, here, as a second case study of Australian pork barrel politics. As with Labor, the Liberal/Nationals Coalition knew its tenure in parliamentary power depended in large part on its ability to convey to voters that its MPs are in tune with the needs and concerns of the electorate, and that the government’s local representatives “deliver” to the nation’s constituencies. But, unlike Labor, the Coalition was a tenuous amalgamation of a large metropolitan-oriented Liberal Party and a much smaller rural and regionally focused Nationals Party. Not surprisingly, the Liberals’ policy orientation was often at odds with the priorities of the Nationals, focusing on urban issues such as mass transport, international trade, taxes and gun control, while the Nationals members of the Coalition struggled to focus governmental initiatives on rural services, dairy assistance and environmental issues in regional Australia. This policy rift left the Coalition open to incursions by independent candidates in rural constituencies, who built their campaigns around attacking the Coalition for ignoring the concerns of rural Australians (Denemark 2014). Given these tensions within the Coalition, and their worsening electoral implications, the 2004 RPP scheme can be seen in large part as the considered attempt to bolster cohesion amongst these two elements of the Coalition, and to convey the Government’s concern for the policy needs of rural and regional voters, and thereby show that Coalition MPs can effectively represent and secure governmental assistance for rural constituents as well as those of Australia’s metropolitan areas. As with the 1993 Sports Grants case, it seems clear the 2004 RPP grants scheme was an attempt to provide a “we deliver” boost to the Government’s own MPs, and to promote targeted local support to their candidates in marginal seats. In addition, however, the RPP grants in 2004 were designed to undercut independent candidates’ appeals for rural voter support, which had begun to erode the electoral vitality of the Nationals in rural constituencies. This, it seems likely, was hoped both to undermine Reprinted from the journal

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Independent (3) Labor (38 )

$18,360,348 17.5%

$9,669,241 9.2%

Liberal (48) $49,443,617 47.2%

Naonals (13) $27,319,528 26.1%

Fig. 3  Sum of regional partnerships program grants by party-held seats distributed by 31 December 2004 (number of seats funded in parentheses). Source: Australian Senate inquiry reported to parliament on 15 August 2005, “Finance and Public Administration Reference Committee, Requested Information on Sustainable Regions.” (See Denemark 2014, p. 570)

insurgent independent candidacies, while promoting the cohesion of the Coalition overall—a vital electoral signal to voters nationwide, as they decided whether the Government was unified, proactive and deserving of re-election. Figure 3 reports the total sum of RPP grants distributed to party-held seats by 31 December 2004 (see Denemark 2014, p. 570). Though Coalition MPs represented only 55% of the 150 House representatives, Liberal and Nationals MPs combined received $A76.7 million in RPP grants, or nearly 74% of the total of the $A104.8 million total. The 65 Labor-held seats received just $A18.4 million, or 17.5% of the RPP total. But it was perhaps the seats of the three independent MPs that were the standout recipients of the RPP funds, garnering nearly $A9.7 million in grants, or 9.2% of the total. Clearly, then, as with Labor’s Sports Grants in 1993, the Coalition’s RPP grants disproportionately benefitted its own MPs, while also pumping huge sums into the three seats controlled by independent MPs—prompting Labor and media claims of political bias. Echoing Labor’s defence of its Sports Grants funding in 1993, the Coalition strenuously argued that the lack of partisan balance in RPP funds was not the product of partisan bias, but rather a reflection of the extent to which Coalition parties represent the program’s targeted rural and regional areas, which were intended to be the prime beneficiaries of the program. However, though much of the funding went by design to MPs representing regional areas, the RPP funds distributed to non-regional divisions were sharply biased in favour of Liberal Party MPs 25

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$25,000,000

Sum of Grants

$20,000,000 $15,000,000 $10,000,000 $5,000,000 $0

Seat Marginality Fig. 4  Sum of regional partnerships program grants approved by election day 2004 by Level of Seat Marginality. Source: Australian Senate inquiry reported to parliament on 15 August 2005, “Finance and Public Administration Reference Committee, Requested Information on Sustainable Regions”. Marginality categories are 2-party preferred swing required to lose the seat in 2004 (See Denemark 2014, p. 574)

(see Denemark 2014, pp. 571–573), prompting criticism both from Labor at parliamentary sessions and in media coverage of the debate. Once again, then, pork barrel distributive politics can be seen as having a counterproductive sting in its tail: parties in government giving taxpayer-funded benefits to themselves inevitably incur the wrath of those excluded from the perks. In this sense, the ranks of those excluded from receipt of benefits may well parallel those of clientelist systems. But, by openly distributing benefits paid out of the general tax pool, pork barrel, if anything, has the potential to prompt a broader base of criticism than those excluded from the more hidden reward schemes under clientelism, as anyone who pays taxes may feel pork barrel robs them to fuel partisan politics they haven’t consented to. In any Australian election, the strategic focus for campaign activities is in those marginally held seats whose slim pre-election margins mean there is a realistic chance of taking the seat away from the opposition or saving it from loss to the opposition. As with the distributive pattern of Labor’s 1993 Sports Grants, which put significantly more funding into marginal than safe seats, the Coalition’s 2004 RPP funds distributed in the months preceding Election Day were also funnelled primarily into marginal seats, while the safest seats in the House received miniscule sums by comparison. As is evident in Fig. 4, while seats with 0–2.5% pre-election swing levels received $A22.7 million in RPP grants, those in the three safest levels of pre-election margins received $A.85, $A1.4 and $A1.3 million, respectively. Clearly, then, the Coalition distributed the lion’s share of RPP taxpayer funds to seats with the most potential for electoral victory for its parliamentary members. Parliamentary governmental systems, by fusing partisan politics with executive discretionary power over public funds, create a significant incentive for ruling parties to use the public purse for best Reprinted from the journal

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Clientelism and distributive politics in Australia: comparing… Table 1  Sum of regional partnerships program grants in the three independent seats Grants in independent-held seats

Grants approved by El day

Bob Katter, Independent MP, Kennedy, QLD Total

$1,935,700

Peter Andren, Independent MP, Calare, NSW Total

$1,285,668

Tony Windsor, Independent MP, New England, NSW Total

$5,787,873

Overall National Mean

$936,187

Source: Australian Senate inquiry reported to parliament on 15 August 2005, “Finance and Public Administration Reference Committee, Requested Information on Sustainable Regions.” (See Denemark 2014, p. 576)

electoral advantage. It is an incentive that is regularly embraced (see my reference to the latest, 2019, Sports Rorts scandal, above). The third key element of the Coalition’s RPP scheme in 2004 involved pumping significant resources into seats controlled by Independents as a way to signal to voters that the Coalition was a valuable ally for rural Australians—one that could provide the sorts of financial support and assets that Independent MPs were unlikely to be able to equal. Australia’s rural and provincial voters had begun to feel voiceless in a Coalition dominated by the urban issues central to the priorities of the dominant Liberal Party. Independent MPs, because they were no longer linked to the Nationals, and its need to support the Liberal agenda, had built their local electoral cachet by criticizing the Coalition’s de-emphasis of rural needs. The RPP scheme, it seems clear, was hoped by Coalition strategists to be a counter to rural voters’ dissatisfaction (Curtin and Costar 2005) and a tangible reason to support Nationals candidates. Table  1 provides details for the grants allocated to the three electoral divisions controlled by Independent candidates Bob Katter (seat of Kennedy, Queensland), Peter Andren (seat of Calare, New South Wales) and Tony Windsor (seat of New England, New South Wales). Despite the higher than average sums poured into these three divisions in support of Nationals Party candidates, the Independent candidates won re-election—all three Independent candidates using the campaign to attack the Coalition and its policies, especially the privatization of the national telecom provider, Telstra, which many feared would see a decline in telecommunication services to rural and provincial Australia (Denemark 2014, p. 577). The Independent candidates also undercut the impact of the RPP grants by arguing the Government was trying to stifle Independents’ criticisms through cashed-up schemes, thus turning the intended electoral effect of the pork barrel funding on its head. Overall, then, the failure of the 2004 RPP funds to provide legitimacy for the Coalition in these three regional seats serves as a reminder that distributive politics, while it can convey a message of government responsiveness to local needs, can also prove to be a significant liability if the opposition candidates and media succeed in portraying the government’s distributive largesse as vote-buying, and not genuine constituency assistance. As with clientelism, if voters perceive the pork barrel 27

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scheme is transparently premised on an elite-controlled system designed to secure votes purely on the basis of rewards, there is a significant likelihood voters will reject the party-in-control and vote their objection, not their support.

Conclusion Clientelism, as we have seen, is a system of distributive politics that fundamentally depends on contingency-based exchanges with voter clients to secure support for those seeking office. In modern political systems in which party membership and resources are waning, the politics of clientelism has increasingly revolved around the need to attract the resources for distribution to voters—in turn creating significant avenues of leverage to the contractors who provide those sums to political patrons, and thus introducing a second, “horizontal”, level of political influence-peddling. The result is an increasingly bi-dimensional model of clientelism that assesses both the politics of resource accrual and its contingency-based distribution to voters and, because it is premised on the provision of state resources or access to governmental policy-making which closely parallels the logic of pork barrel, blurs the boundary between pork barrel and clientelism. Nonetheless, as both levels of its influence, in the end, depend on contingent exchanges of resources for electoral gain, and hence involve significant roles for monitoring and enforcement of the transactions on which it rests, clientelism faces what many contend is the intractable problem of clients’ commitment and their promise to deliver political support in return for the benefits received. Alternatively, parliamentary pork barrel is premised on ruling parties using governmental resources to benefit the members of their own parties’ ranks. It is a system of distributive politics intrinsically premised on a “vertical” authority structure, as only the parliamentary executive has the discretionary power necessary to utilize taxpayer funds for what, ultimately, are strategically determined ends. Thus, fused with partisan power, the parliamentary party-in-government has significant incentives to use taxpayer funds for electoral gain, and to apportion resources where even small vote gains may enable it to secure the seats required to remain in power. The apportionment of funds and programs to local constituencies in partisan pork barrel constitutes a far more generalized, indirect benefit to voters—one that rests not on direct, enforceable rewards for votes, but rather in large part on the ability of pork barrel’s local grants to convey a legitimating signal to voters that those in power “deliver” governmental benefits to constituencies and are, therefore, deserving of re-election. Thus, unlike the enforcers who ensure that those who accept clientelist bribes fulfil their commitment to vote for the patron, the efficacy of partisan pork barrel is determined by strategic pollsters, charged with gauging the vote gain fuelled by constituency-level largesse that they helped to target prior to Election Day. As we have seen, however, despite the obvious incentives that ruling parties have to use taxpayer-funded grants to boost their own electoral fortunes, this selfserving process can backfire if the opposition parties and the media portray these distributive schemes as publically funded electioneering—vote-buying without the Reprinted from the journal

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direct exchange of clientelism, but vote-buying nonetheless. Though the advent of secret ballots and civil service control of public employment has meant traditional clientelism has given way to pork barrel schemes in many modern democracies, the advantages and disadvantages of distributive politics remain fundamentally comparable. While a sizeable minority of voters in most modern countries are disinterested in national-level politics and campaigns, and might thus be more responsive to locally evident spending by the government, the high-profile scandals that often accompany pork barrel revelations can undo the benefits of the most considered of distributive schemes. As we saw with the strategy of the Coalition outspending Independent candidates through its 2004 RPP funds, and the overwhelmingly marginalseats orientation of both the RPP grants and Labor’s distribution of Sports Grants, multi-million dollar schemes distributing taxpayer funds to key electoral areas and programs tend to attract the attention of both the opposition parties and the mass media, which feed off of scandal for their ratings. Regularly, the result is not the intended securing of vital votes, but rather the fuelling of voter resentment and votes against the government. In sum, pork barrel politics and clientelism can both be seen as exchange-based schemes of distributive politics. Their different characteristics are dictated in part by the incentives and opportunity structures afforded by the electoral and governmental systems within which they are implemented, but also by the distinctive mechanisms they wilfully employ to secure their funds and to target, monitor and enforce their distributive exchanges. At the same time, political actors who employ clientelism and pork barrel politics for political advantage increasingly confront a number of equivalent constraints, especially the need to secure political support in times of declining party loyalty and the erosion of the financial resources necessary for waging electoral contests. As a result, studies point to an increasing hybridization of clientelist and pork barrel distributive schemes, reflecting the rise of group-based forms of clientelism and the reliance on contractor contributions secured through provisions of state resources. In the end, despite these increasingly comparable distributive mechanisms, it is perhaps the motive force of swaying vote-support with financial benefits that is the common fabric that most strongly unites them. The allure of securing political support through financial largesse makes political actors of both distributive models willing adherents to the influence they can provide, and transforms them into innocence-protesting culprits when caught buying votes. Compliance with ethical standards  Conflict of interest  On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

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Acta Politica (2021) 56:622–638 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-020-00158-4 ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Administrative clientelism and policy reform failure: the Western Canada Integrated Land Management experience 1990–2015 Michael Howlett1 · Jeremy Rayner2 Published online: 16 April 2020 © Springer Nature Limited 2020

Abstract Policy scholars can learn a great deal from students of clientelism with respect to the forces at work in the policy process. This is apparent, for example, with respect to scholarship in recent years which has focused attention on the idea of replacing patchworks of public policies in specific issue areas with more coordinated or ‘integrated’ policy strategies (IS). In theory, such strategies should display a judicious mix of policy goals and means which can produce policy outcomes matched to specific large-scale problem contexts. Empirical work on such strategies, however, has shown the resilience of pre-existing policy elements often leading to reform failures and/or sub-optimal outcomes from such efforts. This article examines a case study of large-scale policy reform efforts in the area of Integrated Land Management (ILM) in Western Canada which reveals the role played by policy clientelism in blocking efforts to enhance policy integration in this area. This finding is significant in pointing out more generally the role played by clientelism in preventing successful policy reform. Keywords  Clientelism · Administrative clientelism · Land use management · Integrated land use planning · Western Canada · British Columbia · Alberta · Saskatchewan · Manitoba

* Michael Howlett [email protected] Jeremy Rayner [email protected] 1

Department of Political Science, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada

2

Johnson‑Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada



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Introduction: clientelism and the challenges of policy integration Students and resource policy practitioners are all very familiar with the suggestion that better policy results can be achieved through the enhanced “integration” of policy efforts—from the multiple-use planning paradigms of the 1960’s and 1970’s to the sustainability initiatives of the present. Equally, however, they are also all too familiar with the disappointing outcomes of many of the efforts that have attempted to put this maxim into practice. “Integration” in this sense involves the alteration of specific elements of existing policy ‘mixes’ or ‘regimes’—the goals, objectives, and calibrations of existing policy tools—in order to produce a better policy mix. In the resource and environmental area, for example, integration is typically about both enhancing cross-sectoral efforts—such as better integrating energy and environment policy—and re-aligning or de-aligning and replacing certain elements of established regimes—such as replacing unproductive subsidies with more effective ones. The reformed mix which results is expected to avoid the counterproductive or suboptimal policy outcomes associated with an existing “unintegrated” regime and to enhance overall policy efficiency and effectiveness. Empirical work has shown that overcoming the contextual “stickiness” of earlier regime elements is critical to the success of all such integration efforts, but also that it can be very difficult to achieve (Bovens et al. 2001; Grabosky 1995). While the reasons for such failures are not well understood, it is the thesis of this article that many such efforts fail due to the support which “clientelist” policy arrangements provide to existing regime. This is a form of clientelism in which, as Atkinson and Coleman argued, “the state (has) actually relinquishe(d) some of its authority to private sector actors, who, in turn, pursue objectives with which officials are in broad agreement” (1989b, p. 55). In the resource and environmental policy case, this typically involves government agencies interacting with very large-scale resource extraction and harvesting companies in decision-making and policy formulation and implementation activities in a specific manner in which they are beholden to or follow their ‘clients’ lead. As Atkinson and Coleman (1989a, b) noted, this is a form of administrative clientelism which differs from the more typical ‘political’ clientelism with which most studies of the subject are concerned. Rather than focus on how political parties use governments to reward their supporters (and punish their opponents), in ‘administrative clientelism” the patron is the administrative agency and the client is the regulatee or administrative ‘target’ (Christiansen and Piattoni 2003; Eder and Kousis 2001). While ostensibly it is often only the details of policy implementation that are delegated to or driven by private interests in such arrangements, often, because of lack of capacity or information gaps on the government side or a more general pro-market or pro-industry orientation, in such networks the “broad agreement” which frames policy-making in the sector is that the health of the industry is the paramount policy goal. In service to that goal, administrative agencies put in place important policy elements from property rights to financial subsidies which 33

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are oriented towards this end. Importantly, this form of clientelism also creates a barrier to any changes which involve or effect existing harvesting rights and/or the financial health of the industry of which the industry disapproves, limiting the scope and range of administrative action, including policy reforms. The argument being made is that the Western Canada situation examined here is largely a case of administrative “resilience” and lock-in. That is, that entrenched patron-client relationships at the administrative level within strong sectorally oriented ministries blocked efforts at greater cross-departmental coordination and integration. To illustrate this phenomenon, four cases of recent efforts at enhanced resource and land policy integration or “Integrated Land Management” (ILM) in Canada over the period 1990–2015 are examined below. These efforts flowed from the idea that resource policy and planning should be reformed so that it could be undertaken in a multi-sectoral context in order to better account for, and deal with, the cumulative impacts of different resource uses on large-scale ecological systems. This involved integrating sectoral land management regimes put in place over many decades in areas such as forestry and energy, and others such as aboriginal rights and title issues, to create a coherent and all-encompassing regulatory framework. These reforms failed to deliver an integrated policy and the experiences of the four western provinces of Canada, covering an area of land roughly equivalent to Western Europe, over this period illustrate the continuing challenges posed by clientelistic forms of policy-making and administration towards efforts to better coordinate and harmonize policies. More generally, they also illustrate the challenges posed by administrative clientelism towards any effort to integrate or reform policy at any level and subject area.

Integrated resource management strategies as policy reforms: a brief overview In her original work on policy integration, Briassoulis (2005a) noted policy-makers often seek efficiency gains through the better integration of existing policies, reconciling overlaps and duplications and seeking consistency and coherency in the creation of new “integrated’ strategies which cross over existing sectoral and administrative boundaries. These integrated policy designs are intended to address the perceived shortcomings of previous legacy policy regimes, which often developed in a more ad hoc and less integrated fashion. Reform is expected to occur by ‘rationalizing’ existing goals and combining existing and new policy instruments in new ways, so that these instruments support one other in the pursuit of cross-sectoral policy goals. Thus, they attempt to integrate existing, and sometimes competing, policy initiatives into a cohesive strategy; to coordinate the activities of multiple agencies and actors; and, generally, to substitute a more holistic approach to a problem for one that has decomposed policy into a set of multiple and loosely linked problems and solutions (Briassoulis 2005a; Stead et al. 2004). Integrated Land Management (ILM) is one such policy design proposal, one which attempts to create or reconstruct a policy domain in order to produce more Reprinted from the journal

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coherent policy. In this case, the goal is to achieve large-scale land-use and land management goals such as ecosystem sustainability in the face of conflicting resource-use demands from groups as diverse as tourists, mountain bikers, pulp and paper companies and energy mega-corporations. As such, ILM is a good example of the type of policy reform cited above, as it represents an attempt to replace the disparate elements of an existing disorganized land-use policy regime with a more integrated strategy. The need for more integrated resource management is typically promoted in administrative and environmental circles as a response to the shortcomings of existing systems of policy and management based on single-industry regulatory regimes. These latter often contain mutually exclusive or inconsistent policy elements which are thought to prevent efficient and effective land management. The unanticipated outcomes of such arrangements include a neglect of cumulative impacts, leading to unplanned environmental changes; an unnecessarily large resource-use footprint caused by duplication of infrastructure and waste; and the development of overlapping and often competitive administrative arrangements and departments. In Canada, ILM-type designs have been proposed for several decades as the solution to a number of inter-related management problems linked to the development over the past century of several independent resource regimes built around specific resource and land uses, from timber harvesting to oil and gas extraction (Canada, Policy Research Initiative n.d; Demulder and Thorp 2007; Farr et al. 2004; Hanna and Slocombe 2007; Mackendrick et al. 2002; NRTEE 2005). This was the situation faced by policy-makers in the four Western Canadian provinces in the late twentieth century who were confronted with a new set of problems arising from increasing numbers and intensities of land-use conflicts as resource supplies became finite and resource users more entrenched. In each case, they had to deal with these challenges within the context of many decades old policy regimes established on a single-sector basis. Significantly, these old regimes allowed clientelistic forms of policy-making to predominate. These involved on-going politico-administrative arrangements in which governments provided direct access for specific companies to public resources in exchange for co-operation in their management. These arrangements allowed specific resource industries’ special access to the administrative apparatus of government, often in the form of specialized ministries and agencies established to serve the interests of these sector, such as ministries of energy or of forests or agriculture, often with advisory committees and consultative procedures which favored industry ‘clients’. These existing clientelistic regimes generated intertwined political constituencies which supported the preservation of administrative structures designed to manage segregated land uses in exchange for investment and employment in rural areas of the provinces. The problem of (un) Integrated Land Management in Canada Conflict over land uses and their administration is, of course, nothing new either in this region, Canada or elsewhere where similar administrative arrangements were put 35

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into place. In the early era of settlement of the northwest quarter of North America, for example, conflict was a rough and ready process in which the losers in struggles for land or resource rights simply moved on (or were moved on) to the next frontier. After a century or more land-use decisions generated expectations on the part of resource owners and users for exclusive use of land and resources, however, the closing of the frontier generated inter and intra-industry and user conflicts that could no longer be met by moving on or by existing government regulations. For much of the second half of twentieth century, these land-use conflicts were managed by an increasingly complex process of spatial segregation, ushered in by actions such as the province of Alberta’s innovative post World War II system of “white zone” and “green zone” designations for agricultural and resource extraction purposes but replicated in other jurisdictions with sometimes overlapping range and resource rights regimes. This spatial segregation and “priority use zoning” effort to retain single-sector policy-making culminated in detailed province-wide land-use planning efforts in all of the Western Canadian provinces. In most cases, the intensity and pace of these planning efforts were driven by the intensity of the conflicts they were trying to address. A growing realization of the limits of what could be achieved by ever more intensive local or sectoral resource-use plans was the starting point for the attempted transformation of land-use policies in this area, as it was elsewhere in the world at around the same time as critics of sectorally based land-use policy increasingly argued for a more comprehensive reordering of land-use priorities and a more holistic or “integrated” approach to the interactions of different uses across broad landscapes which would be capable of dealing with cumulative impacts. This, however, required a systematic overhaul of the existing regulatory framework and administrative apparatus inherited from the spatially segregated past which proved very difficult to accomplish. While ILM might offer all kinds of advantages in theory in such cases, the political challenges of implementing a new multi-sectoral regime in a clientelistic context were largely neglected by adherents and proponents of the idea. The existing resource regimes were ill-adapted to foster cross-sectoral integration and each possessed a powerful interest in maintaining the status quo. The reality of such relationships and their ability to block changes in an ILM direction is well illustrated by the experiences of the four Western Canadian provinces—Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia—which all attempted to move in a more integrated direction in their resource- and land-use policies over the period 1990–2015 with only limited success. In all the cases examined below, these forces challenged integration reform efforts and, as the case studies illustrate, successfully blocked change in all four jurisdictions.

Efforts to promote integrated resource policies in Western Canada 1990–2015: four case studies British Columbia In many ways, British Columbia’s efforts at ILM provide the most complex and sustained example of an attempted integrated policy transition among the four cases. Reprinted from the journal

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The politics of the all-important forest sector dominated all BC integration efforts over the course of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. However, the variety of drivers of policy change in this sector, including the persistent financial weakness of an export-dependent forest industry, the growing internationalization of forest policy, and the unique position of BC First Nations with respect to aboriginal title and rights, all make the BC case an especially significant one in illustrating the difficulties and challenges of enhanced land management integration. The reform processes began under a long running series of Social Credit governments (1952–1991 with a brief interregnum from 1972 to 1974) which had created a land and resource management regime designed to attract resource-sector investment, promote regional economic development in a sparsely populated province, and fill the provincial treasury. Predicated on the abundance of land and resources, these policy regimes followed a typically Canadian policy clientelist model (Atkinson and Coleman 1989a). Under this form of clientelism, the day-to-day objectives of government policy is always to promote the health of the industry, which is typically fostered through close relationships with ministries that act as sponsors for specific sectors and corporations. Each resource industry gained access to public land and resources in processes of closed negotiation with their sponsoring ministry which subsequently developed separate and overlapping processes of planning and implementation. The regime was maintained for over a half century despite growing discontent with its substance and process on the part of an emerging environmental movement and increasingly empowered First Nations who argued their land rights and titles should also be respected in these processes. These long-standing land-use arrangements were challenged by a series of confrontations between the forest industry and the environmental movement in the 1980s and early 1990s known locally as “the war in the woods.” Throughout this period, environmentalists and First Nations conducted protests, formed blockades, and obtained court injunctions to obstruct forest industry activity, drawing international attention to the province and undermining the legitimacy of the existing clientelist regime (Wilson 1998). This situation was exacerbated in the mid-1990s by the UN-based Brundtlandinspired push to set aside twelve percent of the provincial land base as protected area, a call which catalyzed both the environmental and land claims movements. Protection from resource extraction posed a particular challenge to the forest industry and its government sponsors. In theory, there seemed plenty of land to go around to meet the 12% target but it was often the same scarce, low-elevation, accessible area coveted by the forest industry for their easily accessible mature stands of timber that environmentalists wished to protect for their wildlife and other ecological values. Faced with increasingly unacceptable levels of social conflict after its election in 1991, a new social democratic NDP (New Democratic Party) provincial government attempted policy transformation. Efforts to introduce ILM proliferated and elements of land-use policy were reformed through a classic process of layering (Capano 2019) in which new elements were simply grafted onto existing arrangements. Thus, a new land-use planning regime was created with the overriding goal of conflict 37

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resolution but sat on top of an unchanged set of regulatory institutions designed for the resource industries themselves, including forestry. The new regime featured a variety of innovative, but also experimental, procedural policy instruments that stressed “shared decision-making” at regional-level land- and resource-use planning tables. A new institutional structure featured an arms-length “Commission on Resources and Environment” (CORE), for example, which was initially charged with managing the new regional planning processes and set out to do so through four separate but integrated land-use plans. Of the four flagship regional land-use plans that were supposed to be arrived at by shared decision-making, however, only one was achieved by consensus. The other three planning tables failed to arrive at agreement on future directions and plans and were instead imposed by the provincial government. Far from ending the “war in the woods,” the plans were met with widespread protests and shared decision-making was soon abandoned in favor of the re-creation of the more traditional governmentled clientelist planning model. Planning took place on a smaller scale than in the Social Credit era and featuring some local input into decision-making through the formation of a large number of Land and Resource Management Plans (LRMP) but retained its essential clientelistic shape.1 The LRMP model proved more successful at achieving the goals of conflict resolution and financial certainty for resource industries than did its predecessors. By 2001, four regional land-use plans and thirteen completed LRMPs had received government approval and BC’s protected areas increased from 5.6 percent to 12.5 percent of the provincial land base (Jackson and Curry 2004, p. 33). However, the consequences of layering the land-use planning regime on top of the forest management regime, rather than integrating them, became ever more apparent as the new land-use plans were implemented. In areas where forestry was the major resource activity, implementation was conducted by the same clientelist forest policy network that had existed prior to CORE and throughout the 1990s this network fought a rearguard action against what its members regarded as an overly prescriptive set of forest management regulations (Cashore et al. 2001). They were especially successful in preventing any regulatory linkages between land-use designations and forest practices that would have created more stringent practices in arbitrarily designated special management zones. With a new Liberal government in power after 2001, a new Forest and Range Practices Act (FRPA) was established in order to replace prescriptive regulation with an outcomes-based approach which further entrenched the old clientelist policy processes. After 2001, land-use planning in BC was presented as the incremental task of “completing” the work of previous governments by finishing the outstanding LRMPs and then focusing planning on conflict resolution at smaller scales. The retreat from integrated land management was formally signaled in the announcement of “A New Direction for Strategic Land Use Planning in BC” in 2008 that left

1

  The role of the Commission was gradually reduced until it was replaced in 1995 as part of a general retreat from shared decision-making, when a powerful new central agency, the Land Use Coordination Office (LUCO) gain attempted to impose some order on an increasingly disorganized regime.

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half the province without legal land-use designations, suspended the development of detailed lower level plans that would implement the strategic direction found in the LRMPs and replaced the idea of a regular planning cycle with a commitment to undertake land-use planning where there was a “business case” to do so. Alberta The pattern of attempted ILM reform in BC was thus one of policy layering in response to new challenges to the policy regime, a process which failed to deliver desired levels of integration but which did placate vested interests in the province’s resource sectors. Alberta, the next westernmost province, after the year 2000, also placed a very high priority on reforming its land management and planning processes in order to reduce land-use conflicts associated not with forestry, per se, but with an energy-based oil & gas resource boom that came to be widely regarded as excessive. This process unfolded in a different context than BC as the province had very stable governments and pioneered province-wide land-use zoning in the 1940s before generally followed a sector-based resource planning orientation throughout the 1960s and 1970s. As in BC, resource development has nevertheless proceeded in a series of single-industry “silos,” featuring closed policy networks in which government agencies treated industries as clients, with the health of the industry the overriding policy goal to be attained. As a result, also as in British Columbia, a stable modus vivendi which had existed for several decades between the province’s major land users—notably agriculture and the energy industry but also forestry—was threatened by conflicting land-use activities when the provincial government attempted to ramp-up resource extraction in the energy and forestry sectors in 1985. The provincial government had reduced planning requirements during a downturn in the provincial economy in the late 1990s in order to promote a recovery and then kept this hands-off approach in place as the spike in world energy prices touched off a frenzy of oil and gas development. The substantial investments that this boom attracted—especially to the development of the mineable Athabasca oil sands in the northeast of the province—was accompanied by significant environmental impacts, including large-scale deforestation and logging, resulting in conflicts between the energy industry and other established resource users. In addition to long running conflicts between farmers and the oil and gas industry, the energy boom put increasing pressure on the forest industry which had been encouraged throughout the 1980s to develop the hardwoods in the northern boreal forest to create a substantial pulp and paper and newsprint sector (Pratt and Urquhart 1994; Mackendrick et al. 2002). As land-use conflicts became more common in the Alberta resource sector, regional experimentation with alternative land--use management practices and planning tools occurred, creating a classic disorganized policy mix as described by Bode (2006) (Demulder and Thorp 2007, pp. 32–45). A series of transitional policies and institutions were created and subsequently abandoned as ineffective, notably the 1999 policy statement Alberta’s Commitment to Sustainable Resource and 39

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Environmental Management and the interdepartmental SREM steering committee that attempted to coordinate it. But ultimately, the incoherence of the regime frustrated piecemeal reform efforts, leading to a demand for more systematic policy change in the direction of strategic ILM-type integration. An unusual broad coalition demanded this change, including some of the resource industries themselves, coordinated in this policy area by an umbrella organization, the Alberta Chamber of Resources; interests inside government, especially the Ministry of Sustainable Resource Development (SRD) that hoped to assert its leadership in this area; and a range of environmental interests including conservation biologists, the environmental law community, and local conservation groups. In response, beginning in May, 2006, the Alberta government began consulting with affected groups about a new provincial land-use policy that could address the disorganization and frustration experienced by resource users and other members of the land-use policy network. On the basis of the public input, the policy network developed a draft strategy that was released in May 2008, with the final document released in December of that year (Government of Alberta 2008). The land-use policy documents drew a number of themes that supported their desire for a return to a more centralized state-directed network structure. These goals included the following: better direction and parameters for land-use trade-offs; more integration of the policy regimes for land, air quality, and water; clearer definitions of roles and responsibilities within the new state-led policy network; more attention to the procedural instruments that enhance public involvement and promote conflict resolution; and better information sharing and monitoring (Government of Alberta 2008, p. 8). Seven strategies addressed these themes, the most important details being, like BC, a focus on regional-level planning and the creation of regional land-use objectives as key priorities, the creation of permanent Regional Advisory Councils for each planning region and both a Cabinet Committee and a Provincial Land Use Secretariat to coordinate planning activities. Cumulative effects management, footprint reduction (operational-level integrated land management), and improved baseline data gathering, monitoring, and reporting were all identified as the preferred policy instruments to achieve regional land-use objectives. While observers generally welcomed the new mechanisms to promote policy integration within the government, however, they continued to point to the absence of a statutory framework capable of defining and supporting the process of land-use planning and minimizing political interventions on behalf of one user or another. Without clearly defined procedures, back-stopped by mechanisms to ensure compliance and accountability, planning initiatives progressed slowly and became mired in intractable multi-stakeholder but clientelistic-informed policy reform processes, just as was the case in BC in the 1990s (Kennett and Schneider 2008, p. 11). Saskatchewan Saskatchewan, the least populous and, until recently, the most economically depressed of the four western provinces, provides a contrast to both BC and Reprinted from the journal

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Alberta. Lacking either exogenous shocks capable of transforming the planning system from without, as was the case with Alberta’s tar sands and international oil price increases, or serious political pressures for institutional change, such as the rise of aboriginal rights and title and the activist environmental movement in BC, that could set in motion policy change, the province instead “backed into” its efforts at integrated planning only as a condition of shared cost program forestry funding offered by the federal government during the 1990s. The enabling legislation for forest plans thus remains the principal statutory foundation for provincial land-use plans, in spite of the seemingly contradictory fact that forestry is a negligible and declining resource industry in the province. The provincial land-use policy reforms were put in place in the mid-nineties in response to a federal-provincial shared cost forestry program that required participating provinces to have more explicit long-term forest management plans than were then current in Saskatchewan. In response, Saskatchewan Environment released a framework document in 1995 that provides general guidelines and context for government participation in integrated land-use planning and resource management (Saskatchewan 1995). The document defined integrated forest resource management as “managing the whole ecosystem…to meet a variety of objectives…and allow for a broad range of resource users and gives all stakeholders the opportunity to be informed and involved in management planning.” The Framework also identified the reasons behind the increased need for land-use planning including sustainable development, conflicting uses and increased public awareness of resource activity but it contains no explicit objectives or other means for determining trade-offs between conflicting uses. The key objective of Integrated Land Use Plans in the province was to align permissible land uses with environmental, economic, social, and cultural values. The goal was stated as striking a balance between competing values to ensure a healthy environment and sustainability of forestry resources in the context of a province which relied extensively on agriculture for its prosperity. This modus vivendi was upset by a proposal to expand the province’s forest industry, announced by the provincial government in the spring of 1999. The program was ambitious, embracing 15 new projects with an estimated value of $850 million, and a goal of creating about 10,000 indirect and direct jobs. Several of the projects were intended to have significant First Nations involvement and provide employment and income for economically depressed First Nations’ communities in the north. The expansion triggered efforts to develop a new series of regional landuse plans which engaged agricultural and mining interests in the province and also mobilized the province’s large First Nation’s population concerned with resource industry expansion in many of their traditional territories. Unlike in BC and Alberta, however, the failure of the forestry expansion due to high costs and depressed markets for lumber and pulpwood rendered the planning process largely redundant and led to its failure and the retention of the very limited ILM system put in place in previous years. Although successive provincial governments have revisited the planning framework from time to time, adding new goals and instruments in an ad hoc way, the final snapshot remains a picture of general incoherence and lack of coordination with the government unwilling to 41

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engage further with industry and other stakeholders in promoting enhanced land-use integration. Manitoba Unlike neighboring Saskatchewan, and more like Alberta and British Columbia, Manitoba, the eastern gateway to the Canadian prairies, has in recent years experienced a rapid transformation in its approach to integrated land-use planning. At the center of this transformation was a concerted effort by the Manitoba NDP provincial government to consult with and include Aboriginal people and their communities in the provincial resource management decision-making process. While this particular driver of change has been present in all the other provinces, especially BC and Saskatchewan, its effect had been diminished there by the simultaneous pursuit of other policy goals, such as resource industry expansion and employment, which is less the case in Manitoba. As a result, efforts to promote integrated land management in Manitoba was transformed from the kind of disorganized vehicle to promote vague commitments to sustainability found in Saskatchewan into those promoting a regime with a much more carefully focused and integrated set of goals and instruments. Previously, Manitoba had been insulated from pressure for a more integrated approach to land use for many of the same reasons as Saskatchewan. As with its neighbor, the provincial economy in Manitoba was dominated by agriculture and transportation industries which long ago worked out their conflicts during the railway-building boom in the last decades of the nineteenth century. While hydroelectric and mining-led development in the province’s north was substantial in the 1970s, the areas affected by this development were largely unpopulated and unsuited to agriculture. In addition, the province lacks a substantial forest or oil & gas industry, minimizing the number of potential land-use conflicts found in BC and Alberta and, to a lesser extent, Saskatchewan and leading to a less rancorous set of resource industries. In this context, Manitoba undertook a significant review of its planning regime in the 1990s, driven by efforts to better involve its large First Nation’s population into resource planning and land-use decision-making. It attempted rapid transformative policy change that would have created large-scale “broad area plans” of a recognizably integrated kind. The provincial Planning Act was amended to make provisions for and encourage regional strategies that address not only transportation and infrastructure development, but also commercial, industrial and recreational development, protection of the environment, and economic and social development. In the early 1990s there was also a flurry of interest in incorporating sustainable development into these planning activities. The subsequent Sustainable Development and Consequential Amendments Act layered sustainability ideas onto the old planning framework and reinforced an emphasis on regional or “broad area” planning. The province also undertook a Provincial Land Use Policy (PLUP) Review in order to implement the Planning Act’s support for regional integration. However, the first effort to use this framework was an effort to resolve planning issues on the east Reprinted from the journal

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side of Lake Winnipeg which revealed its limitations. The aboriginal communities in the area opposed aspects of proposed resource development and neither the government nor civil society had the capacity to engage at the level required to produce a strategy over their opposition. The Manitoba government subsequently retreated from its ambitious planning goals and worked instead to build aboriginal planning capacity through a number of smaller scale projects within each original planning area. After extensive consultation, a new Provincial Planning Regulation took effect in 2011 which, while continuing to refer to comprehensive integrated planning, redirected the focus of planning to urban areas and attempted to “streamline” the process by focusing on “issues” rather than integrated planning,

Analysis: the role of administrative clientelism in policy‑making: lessons from the ILM reform experience Each of the four Western Canadian provinces described above were grappling with the classic problems of integration set out by Briassoulis (2005b, p. 51) in the context of their land-use strategies. That is, they have had to determine the following: “(a) What should be integrated, i.e., the object of policy integration; (b) when integration should take place, i.e., at what stage of the policy process; (c) how to analyze policy integration, i.e., along what dimensions; and (d) what criteria to use to assess the achievement of policy integration” (see also Scrase and Sheate 2002). As the four case studies show, Canadian provincial governments followed somewhat different paths in their efforts towards defining and attaining better integration, and began these efforts for somewhat different reasons, although the results have been largely the same: stalled integration efforts (see Table 1). That is, although ILM reform efforts began for different reasons, ranging from the introduction of new resource industries into settled regimes in Saskatchewan and Alberta as well as the introduction of new actors such as First Nations and other aboriginal groups in BC and Manitoba, most efforts were driven by enhanced landuse pressures caused by rapid single-use expansion—such as tar sands related oil & gas activity in Alberta and Saskatchewan—or the exhaustion of new supplies of lands or resources and an increasing concern for sustainability of sectors such as forestry or agriculture in Manitoba and British Columbia. Regardless of what began the process of reform towards ILM, however, there are similarities apparent in both the process followed in each jurisdiction and their ultimate outcome. Each province, for example, initially chose a broad multi-sectoral approach to integration, eschewing what Briassoulis (2005b) has called “a (narrow) process of incorporating certain concerns (e.g., environmental, social, economic) into an extant policy to produce an integrated policy” in favor of “a (broader) process of uniting and harmonizing separate policies to produce an integrated and coherent policy system” (p. 50). In so doing, each province had to grapple with a range of policy formulation and decision-making concerns as well as a host of policy design and implementation issues related to these reform efforts (Luckert 2005; Kennett 2004) including, most 43

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Agriculture, Hydro, Mining, Forestry & First Nations Land Use Integration

Forestry & agriculture, Oil & Gas Integration

Oil & Gas (Tar Sands) and forestry planning integration

Manitoba

Saskatchewan

Alberta

British Columbia Forestry, Parks & Land Management Integration

Reform type

Table 1  Case study summary

Province

Lead agency

Principle content/intent

Post-1991 Commission on Resources and Environment

Post-1999 Interdepartmental Sustainable Resource and Environmental Management steering committee

Post-1995 Saskatchewan Environment

Stalled Integration Effort

Stalled Integration Effort

Reduction of sectoral land-use conflicts Development of enhanced sustainability in forest sector

Stalled Integration Effort

Stalled Integration Effort

Result

Improved provincial integration within federal funding envelope

Post-2008 Provincial Land Use Policy (PLUP) Cross-departmental coordination/ Review sustainability

Dates

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Administrative clientelism and policy reform failure: the…

notably, the effective resistance of clientelist policy networks and administrative arrangements to block reform efforts. The case studies show several common themes across the four jurisdictions examined. First, in terms of timing, integrated strategies were rarely promoted until there was widespread dissatisfaction with the disorganized character of the existing policy regime. At this point, ILM came onto the policy agenda not just as a nice idea but as the solution to a widely perceived problem. Each province exhibited disorganized single-sector regimes which had emerged over long periods of time which frustrated effective implementation, fuelling demands for better, more integrated strategies that would allow multiple stakeholders to operate in a new, common, and credible policy framework. Second, the case studies also all demonstrate a poor record of success in attaining, and planning, to meet ILM goals for enhanced policy integration. One challenge was the multiplication of new actors such as environmentalists and First Nations’ organizations which made the achievement of any level of agreement on integration more difficult to achieve than if just historical clients and regulators had been involved (Bressers and de Bruijn 2005). This multiplication challenged existing planning and consultative mechanisms (Keysar 2005; Brueckner 2007) and raised the issue of governance and policy capacity to the forefront of the analysis of policy integration (Guenette and Alder 2007; Shipman and Stojanovic 2007; Howlett and Rayner 2006a, b). A second challenge revealed in the case studies, however, was more significant. That is the significance of administrative clientelism as a difficult to change mechanism which held existing sectoral planning processes in place and discouraged, and resisted, policy integration efforts.

Conclusion: the challenges to integration posed by administrative clientelism Land-use policy in the four western provinces of Canada provides a particularly clear set of examples highlighting the challenges faced by governments attempting to implement ILM in an administrative clientelistic setting. All four provinces display a pre-history of attempting to develop particular resource industries as engines of regional economic development, particularly in their sparsely populated northern or interior areas, creating legacies of unrelated, clientelist single-industry policy regimes which were allowed to drift for several decades or longer. As Kennett (2006) argued: (t)he laws and institutions for resource and environmental management in Canadian jurisdictions have generally evolved over time in response to particular issues, needs and priorities. As a result, these regimes tend(ed) to be loosely structured, with their principal components focusing on specific resource sectors … and discrete decision-making processes … As a result of these processes, the existing organizational structure within each government was characterized by sectoral ‘silos’ with weak linkages across sectors and among decision-making processes. This sectoral focus, powerfully supported by 45

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clientelist policy networks, was the origin of many difficulties in attempts to reform policy processes so as to be able to better deal with interconnected issues. When the fragmented and incremental decision-making processes’ characteristic of those policy regimes were challenged by any number of policy problems and development— ranging from federal government demands to the emergence of new policy players such as environmental groups and First Nations or the re-weighting of provincial priorities in booming energy markets—these new forces proved unequal to the task of re-orienting or otherwise altering sectoral clientelistic policy arrangements and subsequently failed in their efforts to promote alternative ILM schemes. In each case examined above, entrenched patron–client relation at the administrative level within strong sectorally oriented ministries blocked efforts at greater cross-departmental coordination and integration. Sectoral clientelism of this kind is different from the patron-client relationships highlighted by early studies of political clientelism. However, the same blurring of boundaries and confusion of public and private purposes characterize both. Such policy-oriented clientelist arrangements generally lack the element of corruption or personal gain that characterizes studies of clientelist party systems. But what administrative clientelist networks do is dramatically constrain the range of available policy options to governments, impeding reform in much the same way. As the case studies show, policy innovations in such cases will be limited to those that demonstrably maintain the current economic structure of the sector up to and sometimes even beyond the point where that structure is a liability to its own survival.

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Administrative clientelism and policy reform failure: the… Christiansen, T., and S. Piattoni (eds.). 2003. Informal governance in the European Union. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. Demulder, B., and W. Thorp. 2007. Integrated Landscape Management: Moving Forward, 2003–2007. Edmonton: Alberta Chamber of Resources. Eder, K., and M. Kousis (eds.). 2001. Environmental Politics in Southern Europe: Actors, Institutions and Discourses in a Europeanising Society. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Farr, Daniel, Steve Kennet, Monique Ross, Brad Stelfox, and Marian Weber. 2004. Al-Pac Case Study Report – Part 2, Regulatory Barriers and Options. Prepared for the NRTEE. Calgary: Canadian Institute for Resource Law. https​://ilm.law.uvic.ca/PDF/alpac​cases​tudy2​.pdf. Accessed 20 Feb 2019. Government of Alberta. 2008. Final Land Use Framework. Edmonton (Online at https​://www.landu​ se.alber​ta.ca/docum​ents/Final​_Land_use_Frame​work.pdf. Accessed 12 May 2009. Grabosky, P.N. 1994. Green Markets: Environmental Regulation by the Private Sector. Law and Policy. 16 (4): 419–448. Grabosky, Paul. 1995. Counterproductive Regulation. International Journal of the Sociology of Law. 23: 347–369. Guenette, Sylvie, and Jackie Alder. 2007. Lessons from Marine Protected Areas and Integrated Ocean Management Initiatives in Canada. Coastal Management 33: 51–78. Hacker, J.S. 2005. Policy Drift: The Hidden Politics of US Welfare State Retrenchment. In Beyond Continuity: Institutional Change in Advanced Political Economies, ed. W. Streek and K. Thelen, 40–82. Press: Oxford, Oxford University. Hanna, K., and D. Scott Slocombe. 2007. Integrated Resource and Environmental Management: Concepts and Practice. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Howlett, M., and J. Rayner. 2006a. Globalization and Governance Capacity: Explaining Divergence in National Forest Programmes as Instances of "Next-Generation" Regulation in Canada and Europe. Governance 19 (2): 251–275. Howlett, Michael, and Jeremy Rayner. 2006b. Convergence and Divergence in ‘New Governance’ Arrangements: Evidence from European Integrated Natural Resource Strategies. Journal of Public Policy 26 (2): 167–189. Jackson, Tony, and John Curry. 2004. Peace in the Woods: Sustainability and the Democratization of Land Use Planning and Resource Management on Crown Lands in British Columbia. International Planning Studies 9 (1): 27–42. Kennett, S. A. 2004. Integrated Landscape Management in Canada: Initial Overview and Analytical Framework. Calgary. Kennett, Steven A. 2006. Integrated Landscape Management in Canada: Getting from Here to There, 17. Calgary: Canadian Institute of Resources Law, Occasional Paper. Kennett, S., and R. Schneider. 2008. Making It Real: Implementing Alberta’s Land Use Framework. Edmonton: Pembina Institute and Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. Keysar, E. 2005. Procedural Integration in Support of Environmental Policy Objectives: Implementing Sustainability. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 48 (4): 549–569. Luckert, M.K. 2005. In Search of Optimal Institutions for Sustainable Forest Management: Lessons from Developed and Developing Countries. In Institutions, Sustainability and Natural Resources, ed. S. Kant and R.A. Berry. Amsterdam: Springer. Mackendrick, Norah, Colette Fluet, Debra J. Davidson, Naomi Krogman, and Monique Ross. 2002. Integrated Resource Management in Alberta’s Boreal Forest: Opportunities and Constraints. Interim Project Report. Edmonton: Sustainable Forest Management Network. https​://ilm.law.uvic.ca/resou​ rces/index​.htm. Accessed 3 Jan 2009. NRTEE [National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy]. 2005. Boreal Futures: Governance, Conservation and Development in Canada’s Boreal. Ottawa. Renouf. https​://nrt-trn.ca/wpconte​nt/uploa​ds/2011/06/borea​l-futur​es-eng.pdf Accessed 20 Feb 2019. Pratt, Larry, and Ian Urquhart. 1994. The Last Great Forest: Japanese Multinationals and Alberta’s Northern Forests. Edmonton: NewWest. Saskatchewan, Saskatchewan Environment. 1995. A Framework for Integrated Land and Resource Management Planning Scrase, J.I., and W.R. Sheate. 2002. Integration and Integrated Approaches to Assessment: What Do They Mean for the Environment. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning 4 (1): 275–294. Shipman, Brian, and Tim Stojanovic. 2007. Facts, Fictions and Failures in Integrated Coastal Zone Management in Europe. Coastal Management 35: 375–398.

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Acta Politica (2021) 56:639–657 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-020-00188-y ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Authoritarian clientelism: the case of the president’s ‘creatures’ in Cameroon Sergiu Mişcoiu1   · Louis‑Marie Kakdeu1 Accepted: 2 December 2020 / Published online: 4 January 2021 © The Author(s) 2021

Abstract Within this article, we aim at exploring the topic of clientelism in Cameroon as a species of a wider phenomenon affecting Central and Western Francophone Africa. Our argument is that, in spite of the repeated efforts of reinforcing the local power structures, we have witnessed a process of centralisation of clientelism: the new networks are shaped around the ‘Creatures’, who are the President Paul Biya’s formal or informal appointees and play the role of nodal elements relying the rest of the chain to the central command. This happened on the expenses of the locally dispersed and more autonomous clientelistic groups that were either included in or smashed by the pyramidal Creatures’ structured. In order to test our assumption, we analysed a specific body of literature on the theorization of clientelism and on its African and Cameroonian specificity and organized four focus groups with the actual and former members of the clientelistic chains at different levels (central, regional and local). If our main presupposition proved to be generally correct, one of the sub-arguments was only partially validated through this empirical component of our research. Keywords  Clientelism · Networks · Authoritarianism · Creatures · Cameroon · Central Africa

Introduction Literature on political clientelism is already abundant and diverse. Various theoretical aspects, such as defining clientelism (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007), exploring its historical roots (Piatoni 2001) or designing and amending different models of clientelism (Gherghina and Volintiru 2017) have been deeply and convincingly approached by numerous relevant authors. Among the key dimensions explored This is part of the special issue on Varieties of Clientelism edited by Miroslav Nemcok and Sergiu Gherghina. * Sergiu Mişcoiu [email protected] Louis‑Marie Kakdeu [email protected] 1



Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj‑Napoca, Romania

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in literature, some relevant analyses focused on the cultural differentiations within the worldwide phenomenon of clientelism (Briquet and Sawicki 1998), leading to local, regional, national or ‘civilizational’ specificities of the patron-client networks (Gans-Morse et al. 2014). Within this latter set of scientific concerns, the Sub-Saharan African societal and political systems appear as being among the most fertile grounds for studying clientelism. This is mainly because the ethno-tribal relations are dominant in almost all the countries of the region and party politics developed within a pre-structured framework where the traditional bonds of affinity and allegiance, which were mediated via complex systems of ritual offer and informal taxation, had to be extended and institutionalized to the newly created ‘modern’ national layers (Posner 2005, pp. 1–20; Falola and Mbah 2014, pp. 5–8). Consequently, as various authors observed, the traditional practices of patronage were the fishbone structure for the emergence of the wider political formations (Olivier de Sardan 1996; Basedau et  al. 2011). These practices lost their immediacy because of the scale-effect of the new national frameworks and created increasingly diffuse, sophisticated and difficultly readable wider patron-client systems. Moreover, these practices are not only contributed to the initial emergence of the Sub-Saharan African political systems but also remained dominant even several decades after decolonization (Cheeseman and Larmer 2013; Kramon 2017, pp. 3–31). At the same time, studying clientelism and other related practices in Sub-Saharan Africa proves to be revealing for the general understanding of this phenomenon. Firstly, because of the richness and variety of the clientelistic practices and of the various forms of hybridization between clientelism and other related phenomena in the region, such as, for instance, neopatrimonialism (Bach and Gazibo 2013). And then because the Western, Eastern and Austral African countries are the mirror of the radically uneven economic growth that the contemporary phase of globalization produced, with extremely thin strata of wealthy and cosmopolitan elites and with the quasi-totality of the others confronted with poverty and severe marginalization (Sembene 2015). Consequently, the pre-existing state of material dependence emerging during the post-colonial decades accentuated accross the last twenty years and allowed for the further consolidation and diversification of the clientelistic structures (Harrison 2006). But such processes of polarization seem to affect also an increasing number of countries in Latin America (e.g. Brazil and Venezuela), Southeast Asia (e.g. Vietnam and the Philippines) or the former Soviet space (e.g. Ukraine and Kazakhstan) (Chakravarty 2010; Berenshot and Aspinall 2020). The Sub-Saharan case studies for clientelism could thus enhance our capacity to understand its complexity in economically and socially increasingly polarized societies. Our research aims at bringing a contribution to the understanding of clientelism by producing an analysis of the new particular manners in which, in quasi-authoritarian regimes, clientelism becomes centralized and rearticulated around nodal points. What is the specificity of these nodal points within these clientelistic systems? What are their functions and how do the “inferior” layers of the clientelistic networks perceive their status and influence within the political systems, especially in terms of mobilization and resource distribution? As we will show, these nodal points are embodied by key actors known as ‘Creatures’ who have become essential Reprinted from the journal

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for both the stability and the permanent adaptation of the political systems, insuring in this way their continuity. Concentrating on Cameroon as a case study, we will analyse the contribution of the Creatures—defined as political-administrative elites who owe their existence to a presidential formal or informal decision of nomination—to the perpetuation of the incumbent president in power via their role within the clientelistic system. We organize our article in four parts: (1) In the first, we will briefly study the theoretical framework and will present our main arguments; (2) in the second, we will motivate our choice of Cameroon as case study and will present the research design; (3) in the third, we will shortly present the Cameroonian political context, insisting on aspects related to clientelism; (4) and in the fourth, we will test our arguments using and discussing the results of the four focus groups we conducted with former members of Creatures’ staffs and with party militants in three different key-regions of the country.

Theory and argument While literature extensively concentrates on classical cases, such as Western Europe (Piattoni 2001), North America and Southeast Asia (from Scott 1972 to Hicken 2011) and more recently on Eastern Europe (Volintiru 2016) and Latin America (Hilgers 2013), African political systems’ clientelisms have been to some extent more tardily approached (Banywesize 2015; Ruiz de Elvira et al. 2019, pp. 5–22). Moreover, among the existing studies on clientelism in Africa, the ones on former French Equatorial Africa are even less numerous. Why is that? First, because the studies about clientelism follow the iron laws of progressiveness in science: as the African states are among the latest states to be created, the understanding processes of the political phenomena taking place in those states has lacked for a very long time the necessary knowledge infrastructures in terms of capacity of understanding. And then, because of the legacy of the French colonial model itself. As opposed to the British one, the French model imposed a Jacobin pattern to its colonies, with no recognition of the local chieftains and other traditional leaders, and with a homogeneous and centralized administrative management of the territories (Sy 2017). This led to an almost total ignorance with regard to the mechanisms of functioning of the ‘indigenous’ society and consequently, later on, of the processes of networking, political aggregation, decision-making or policy implementation within the local and the regional layers of the post-colonial states. Early literature discusses the incipient development of the electoral behaviour in Francophone Western and Central Africa and stresses its specificity: the feeble nature of political-electoral competitiveness and the abundance of the single-party or one-dominant-party systems (Debbach 1966; Jackson and Rosberg 1982; Aly Dieng 2012); the overwhelmingly ethno-tribal vote (Bogaards 2004, pp. 59–60; Carbone 2006); and the full dependence of the electorates of the elites’ will to discretionarily distribute the whole range of basic resources and services, including food, water, electricity, vaccination and minimal security. This is what remained as la politique du ventre (the ‘politics of the stomach’), a famous formula through which 51

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Jean-François Bayart (Bayart 1989) described the penchant of the African communities to promise their electoral support to those who promise in return the fulfilment of these basic needs (which does not imply that either of the two would keep their promise as such). Client-patron relationships would thus be from the outset the very way of functioning of African politics (Médard 2007; Lindberg 2003, p. 140). The democratic wave which followed the fall of Communism in the USSR and in Eastern Europe (1989–1991) and which enhanced pluralism or, in other cases, engendered it for the first time could only reinforce clientelism, as more competitors meant more opportunities to restructure the existing networks and to create new ones (Bratton and Van der Walle 1994, pp. 453–6). The increasingly competitive electoral systems of the Central and especially of the Western former French colonial African countries made the patron-client relations system more complex and less easily readable, especially for the non-local observers (Morice 2000; Van der Walle 2014, pp. 230–243). Within the existing literature on clientelism in the Sub-Saharan Francophone countries, most contributions have focused on the states where pluralism has produced either regular alternation in power, as it has been the case in Benin and Senegal, where some incumbent presidents and their parliamentary majorities occasionally lost the elections (Wantchékon 2003; Beck 2008; Mişcoiu 2012), or on the cases of at least one change of majority (like in Guinea, Niger, Mali and the Ivory Coast). With some remarkable exceptions (such as Lemarchand 1972), fewer papers concentrate on clientelism in the semi-authoritarian regimes, where real alternatives to power have never happened since the 1960s independence, as it is the case in Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, Togo and Cameroon. The main focus of these writings is on the clientelistic systems of influence established between France via its industrial holdings and its former African colonies, particularly salient in the cases of the oil exporting Gabon and Congo-Brazzaville (Obiang 2007, pp. 9–27). On a contrary, there are even fewer analyses concerning the domestic systems of clientelism proper to the semi-authoritarian regimes in former French Central Africa (Vicente and Wantchékon 2009; Lust-Okar 2009). Moreover, one of the most salient theoretical delineations—the one between organizational clientelism and electoral clientelism (Kopeczy et al. 2012) —seems to be only partly pertinent when studying the semi-authoritarian Central African systems. On one hand, the circuits between the local party leaders and the other local elites are fluid and the party organizational structures and rules are at most formal, as their existence and configuration permanently depends of the authoritarian decisions taken at the central level (De Walle 2003; Diop 2006, pp. 11–35). Thus, who belongs to a political party in a particular moment and who does what within that party can be changed by decisions taken by the top-hierarchy: potent local businessmen and religious or traditional leaders are permanently co-opted in the parties, often invited to take over local or regional branches and might be removed with the same haste (Carbone 2006; Souaré 2017). On the other hand, local and regional party leaders engage to a lesser extent with regular voters in relations of direct electoral clientelism (Driscoll 2018). Instead, because of the complexity of the still traditional societal configurations, they have to persuade the relevant chieftains who control at their turn the votes of the traditional community leaders and the heads Reprinted from the journal

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of wider families (Lemarchand 1972, pp. 72–76). Some chieftains themselves may directly play the roles of local party leaders or may wish to claim such functions, reversing in this way the patron-client relations and thus blurring even more the distinctions between organizational and electoral clientelism (Blundo et  al. 2007, pp. 102–112; Lindberg and Morrison 2008, pp. 108–115). Diverse academic researches indicate that several aspects related to the constitution, the componence and the functioning of the clientelistic structures are both important and problematic. Firstly, the very fishbone of the clientelistic structures and especially the identity of the actors who fulfil the role of the structures’ articulatory vertebrae. Several authors consider that these structures depend of who are the nodal points of their articulation, both in terms of identity, origin or social, economic and cultural status, and in terms of mechanisms of selection (election, nomination, self-empowerment etc.) (Abente-Brun 2014; Szwarcberg 2015, pp. 1–32). Secondly, attention has been payed to the role distribution within the clientelistic structures and to the capacity of its different elements to mobilize voters, either directly or via some more local influencers whom they co-opt and then control (such as local chieftains, heads of tribes, councillors etc.) (Roniger 1994, pp. 208–210; Osei 2012, pp. 256–259). And finally, other authors investigated the aspects related to effective capacity of the structures’ nodal elements to contribute to the preservation of the loyalty of the group’s members and to the fulfilment of their targets in terms of the number of voters and/or in terms of insuring the loyalty of the local factors of influence who mobilize at their turn the constituents (Beck 2008, pp. 222–226; Siegel 2017). In formulating our main argument, we kept in mind these series of aspects that have recurrently appeared as being relevant for the understanding of the clientelistic practices under semi-authoritarian regimes. Our argument is that the particular type of clientelism established in the Central African semi-authoritarian regimes is meant to insure the re-election of the incumbent President through the extensive use of the influence of the ‘Creatures’, who play a crucial triple role: (1) they mobilize the local and regional networks for the elections, (2) they insure the party discipline and allegiance to the decisions of the President, and (3) they act as negotiators between the political command centre that dispatches the resources and the local stakeholders who directly provide the electoral support. The origin of the notion of ‘Creature’ is traceable in a 2010 speech of the former Cameroonian Minister of Higher Education, Jacques Fame Ndongo that became rapidly viral and determined a vivid public debate about the establishment’s degree of responsibility and reliability: We are all the creatures or the creations of President Paul Biya, it is him who is entitled to the whole glory of whatever we do. None of us is important, we are nothing more but his servants or, even better, his slaves.1 1   “Nous sommes tous des créatures ou des créations du président Paul Biya, c’est à lui que doit revenir toute la gloire dans tout ce que nous faisons. Personne d’entre nous n’est important, nous ne sommes que ses serviteurs, mieux, ses esclaves”. http://www.camer​oonvo​ice.com/news/artic​le-news-1558.html Retrieved 17 April 2019.

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Borrowing this already publicly entrenched term, we define as Creature any senior political-administrative elite that owes his/her career to a presidential decision (Malaquais 2002). This includes several categories of appointed or elected members of the political-administrative (Pigeaud 2011). In the following section, after explaining the reasons for choosing our case study, we will define, explore and discuss in detail the notion of Creature.

Research design Choosing the case study: why Cameroon? Among the Sub-Saharan Francophone ex-colonies, Cameroon is a particularly interesting case for clientelism for at least two major reasons, the first concerning the constitutional structure and the historical evolution of the country and the second being related to length of uninterrupted continuity in power of the actual President. Following the guidelines formulated by John Gerring (Garring 2016, pp. 39–55), these two reasons should be sufficient to justify our option for Cameroon as case study for analysing the above-mentioned aspects of clientelism. First, because it is a state founded as a result of the merger of two territories, one having been a part of the French colonial empire (with a special status), the other (a smaller South-Western and North-Western part) being before a segment of a wider British colony. Consequently, after the Independence, Cameroon became initially a federation, with two widely autonomous pillars (Johnson 1970, pp. 26–40; Ndi 2014). The progressive reinforcement of the Capital’s power under the increasingly dictatorial rule of the first President, Amadou Ahidjo, allowed for the transformation of the country into a unitary state in 1972. This process required the penetration of the Anglophone areas by the pro-Yaoundé networks of influence (Bayart 1985). Such an operation could not have taken place in a direct and non-mediated way, but only via the construction of some regional English-speaking networks and some national bilingual networks, all attached to the central government via the customary practice according to which while the President was naturally Francophone, the Prime Minister should be a representative of the Anglophone community. The formation and the effectiveness of this clientelistic system, with semi-autonomous Anglophone regional and national leaders, organized in the Social Democratic Front/SDF, prompting (sometimes conditionally) the Francophone ruling party, the Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement/RDPC, made it a model for the entire country, so for the main Francophone territories also (Banock 1992; Etogo 2012). A second reason why Cameroon is an interesting case for clientelism is that, while there are other countries in the area with limited or no real alternative in power (Mişcoiu 2018), Cameroon is the only one where there has been the same party in power since the Independence (1960) and where the same President has been leading with no interruption since the era of the single state-party to today’s formal pluralism (with more than 300 registered parties). The fact that Paul Biya has been continuously in power since 1982, ruling the country through the same single and then dominant party has allowed him to appoint, control and handle several entire Reprinted from the journal

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generations of political and administrative leaders at all levels (Kakdeu 2015). For instance, up to April 2019, the President of the Republic of Cameroon had formed 36 governments (with 315 ministers), an average of one government a year since he took power. This qualifies Cameroon as a special case of centralized linguistically and regionally heterogeneous clientelism. Identifying the creatures In the semi-authoritarian regime of Cameroon, all major appointed or elected public officials are designated by the same person who is at the same time the national president of the party (RDPC) and the President of the Republic. Thus, not only the appointed officials but also the candidates of the party in power to parliamentary and local elections are nominated by the same country’s and party’s head, Paul Biya. In this sense, he is effectively their “Creator” and consequently they are his “Creatures”. Who are these Creatures? Based on a prior systematic research (Mişcoiu and Kakdeu 2019), we identified several categories of Creatures. First, major officials in the central administration. The acting government appointed in 2019 counts 63 members including a Prime Minister, 4 ministers of State, 31 ministers, 12 deputy ministers, 5 ministers in charge of missions and 10 secretaries of state. According to the 2011 presidential decree reorganizing the Presidency of the Republic, 6 employees of the President of the Republic are also members of the government (the secretary general of the presidency and his two deputies, the director of the civil cabinet and his deputy, and the general delegate for national security). According to the organization of the Prime Minister’s Services, 3 prime ministerial staff also have the rank and prerogatives of minister (the Secretary General of the Prime Minister’s Service and his deputy, and the Director of the Prime Minister’s Office). So, we have a total of 71 Creatures who are members of the Government. At the same central level, in the ministerial departments, Cameroon has 37 secretaries general of ministries, 364 delegated or entrusted governmental commissionaires and 55 directors of public establishments. This makes a total of 456 other Creatures in the second ranks of the ministries. Then, majority MPs in the National Assembly and the Senate. Out of the 180 deputies of the National Assembly elected in February 2020, 152 belong to the RDPC. To these deputies we should add the 3 members of the Assemblies’ bureau appointed by presidential decree (including the secretary general and 2 deputies). This makes a total of 155 Creatures in the National Assembly. As for the Senate, out of the 100 senators designated in 2018 (30 appointed by the President of the Republic and 70 elected by the municipal councillors), the presidential majority counts 93. If we add the 3 members appointed by presidential decree in this chamber’s bureau also, we reach a total of 96 Creatures in the Senate. According to the 2008 and 2019 administrative organization laws, there are 10 governors of region, 58 divisional officers, 360 sub-divisional officers, 360 mayors of municipalities, and 14 mayors of cities. Following the February 2020 elections, the RDPC obtained 316 municipal mayors and all the city 14 mayors. This makes a 55

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total of 758 local and regional administration officials “created” by the President of the Republic. All in all, there are currently 1536 Creatures. More than three quarters are men and more than three fifths are entrenched outside the capital city, Yaoundé, where they spend most of their time. Only about 90 of them are not RDPC registered members, mainly because they continue to be active in the military or in the justice system, in spite of the formal but rarely enforced interdiction to do so. Methods Once again, our argument is that the Creatures are the articulatory nodes of the Cameroonian clientelistic structures and play a crucial triple role: (1) they mobilize the local and regional networks for the elections, (2) they insure the party discipline and allegiance to the central decisions, and (3) they act as negotiators between the centre and the local stakeholders. In order to check the validity of our arguments, we organized four focus groups. The first (FG1) was made of former members of nine Creatures’ staffs and was meant to allow us to penetrate into the functioning details of the Creatures as nodal points between the territorial networks and the President’s inner circle. We mainly focused on the mechanisms of transmission of the President’s mobilizing message to the local and regional actors within the vertical clientelistic structures which they belong to. The second (FG2), the third (FG3) and the forth (FG4) focus groups assembled regional and local activists of the RDPC from three different regions: his stronghold of the South (the Beti ethnic region, where Biya made 92% in the 2018 presidential elections)—FG2, with nine participants; an overall pro-Biya region (the West) but with a strong pro-opposition movement (the Bamileke ethnic region, where he made 62%)—FG3 (eight members); and the opposition stronghold of the Littoral (a mix ethnic region, where he came second with 35% after the opposition’s leader Maurice Kamto)—FG4 (seven participants). The purpose of these three FGs was to test the perceived relevance of the Creatures’ influence on the electoral mobilization of the local structures and to evaluate the perception of the regular militants with regard to the Creatures’ roles as discipline-makers and President’s interests’ representatives. The duration of each FG was between 2h1/2 and 3  h and each FG was co-led by the two co-authors of this research paper. The randomized selection of the FG participants was variably problematic. For the FG1, we tried to keep the highest degree of diversity, in terms of gender, language, ethnicity and seniority in service both in what concerns the members of the FG and the profiles of the Creatures that they served before. For the other FGs, we tried to balance the imperatives of diversity in representation with the need to proportionally reflect as much as possible the regional specificity of the RDPC’s sociology. For instance, we introduced more urban militants and more women in the FG3 than in the FG2. One problematic aspect was related to the discrepancy between the willingness of the Southern region RDPC activists to participate to the FG2 and the hesitations of those of the Littoral to join the FG4, which were obviously explainable by the important differences Reprinted from the journal

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in the degree of popularity of Biya and of his party in the two provinces, as Biya belongs to the Beti ethnic group who is dominant in the South and with whom the Bamileke, more numerous in the West, hold a historical rivalry (Onana 2005). Almost all the participants insisted on the need to remain anonymous and some of them asked us to change the initial letters of their names in the research reports so as they could not be retrieved by the party’s watchers. Thus, we changed all the initials of the names of the FG participants and in this way all the participants accepted to be audio-recorded and to be quoted. In terms of compensation, we offered symbolic gifts and one lunch/dinner to all the participants. We used a two-part scenario: the first part was common to all the three FGs, while the second was specific to FG1 and, respectively to the last three FGs, targeting relevant issues, such as the particular understandings of the Creatures’ status and the real impact on determining the electoral behaviour of the local electorates or the capacity of the FG participants to mobilize resources and voters. For the FG results’ analysis, we adapted the methodology proposed by John M. Creswell (Creswell 2014). We resorted to a two-layered analysis—that of the individual views, observations and motivations, on one hand; and that of the groups’ dynamics and its influence on the individuals’ opinions on the issues in discussion, on the other hand. The research focused on issues such as the strength of individual beliefs and opinions on the Cameroonian political developments (e.g. the new candidature of the incumbent president), the reasons for correlations between analysis and behaviours (e.g. backing the President’s campaign), the articulation mechanisms of different political topics or events and the propensity for changing or reinforcing the participants’ views on the main topic of the research (e.g. the reinforcement of the opposition’s platforms and its incapacity to gather in a single counter-candidature against Biya). The adaptation we made consisted in a stronger insistence on the individual level, which is more relevant for depicting the reasons behind the members’ own understandings of the political situation and their participation to Biya’s campaigns, including in some occasions active lobbying and direct conditioning of the future financial support for certain field agents and elected officials. And, unlike Creswell’s methods, we took less into account the focus groups’ dynamics, except for those situations in which the participants lacked a precise opinion on certain relevant aspects and the FG experiment made them form some views as a result of their interactions with the other FG participants.

The Cameroonian general context in brief In addition to the reasons that justify picking Cameroon as a case study, we will briefly expose here some relevant elements about this country’s societal and political framework. First, there is an overwhelming influence of the precolonial traditional society, structured around chiefdoms which play a quasi-official role of administrative assisting bodies. There are 80 first-level chiefdoms in the country, 862s-level chiefdoms and innumerable third-level chiefdoms which break down into neighbourhood chiefdoms. The chiefdom has the authority to render traditional justice especially for land and civil affairs, including inheritance 57

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(Hamani 2005). It influences political practice, especially with regard to the perception of power. Indeed, the idea of the verticality of power and presidentialism is not only a colonial legacy (Kakdeu 2015). In ancestral society, a powerful leader had to show manliness at the risk of being overthrown; he was the custodian of all powers: judicial, military, legislative, executive and mystical. During his enthronement, people used to collect the various mystical forces of the kingdom and offer them to the chief (Owona 2015). Thus, after taking power in 1982, Paul Biya had toured the country to be initiated and ended up by being named “Nnom Ngui” [Chief of Chiefs] in his region of origin (Kpwang 2011, pp. 51–68). Secondly, Cameroon has a centralized and hierarchical administrative organization. It goes from the traditional chiefdoms to the regions passing by the subdivisions and the divisions, respectively. The country has 360 subdivisions, 58 divisions and 10 regions. Regions are under the authority of governors appointed by the President of the Republic who also appoints sub-divisional and divisional officers. The designation of a Chief is done under the supervision of administrative authorities. Therefore, all administrative officials respond to the President of the Republic despite the existence of an official hierarchy among themselves. This act of appointment gives to the President the power of ‘creation’. At the same time, the process of decentralisation, initiated in 1996, has been particularly slow and inconsistent (Kakdeu 2015). Thirdly, Cameroon is affected by the economic precariousness that drives citizens to compromise. Given the underemployment rate of people aged 15 and over at 69.6% (INS 2016, 147) and a poverty rate of 37.5% in 2014 (INS 2016, 66), the battle of social climbing is tough. After an initial period of prosperity based on the high raw material prices (1965 to 1985), the economic situation has sharply deteriorated. Nowadays, the economy is dominated by small farms which have grown by exporting crops since colonial times. The average income of a small family farm is 300,000 FCFA (about 458 euros) per year. In this context, it is common for citizens to exchange their votes or their activism for money or a promise of social climbing (Vicente and Wantchékon 2009). Finally, opposition parties are weak and political transhumance is high. In 1990, most African Francophone countries started their democratization process to sustain their relation with the North (Lynch and Crawford 2011, pp. 275–283). In Cameroon, despite the emergence of pluralism, President Paul Biya and his party succeeded to continuously remain in power, securing and even consolidating his majority in Parliament after the sole tight election that took place in 1992 (Nkainfon Pefura 1996). The public administration is politicized and openly campaigns for the RDPC, while the entire electoral apparatus is under its control. Biya appoints the members of the electoral commission and the members of the Constitutional Council in charge of the settlement of electoral disputes and the proclamation of the results. In 2018, after an unfair vote (Jeune Afrique 2018), he was re-elected with 71% and few weeks later, the main opposition candidate, Maurice Kamto, and his party’s staff have been accused of civic insubordination and arrested. Reprinted from the journal

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The focus group results The FG research allowed us to test the main arguments and then to draw some relevant conclusions concerning the conditions of its validity. Once again, our idea was that the FG groups would reveal the triple role of the Creatures: (1) to mobilize the local and regional structures for the elections, (2) to insure party discipline and allegiance to the decisions of the President, and (3) to act as negotiators between the political centre and the local stakeholders who mobilize the voters.

What is a creature? To begin with, it is important to assess the FG participants’ understandings of the notion of Creature. In fact, there was a high degree of consensus over the existence of the Creatures, about the empirical validity of this notion and a relatively high consensus about the Creatures’ characteristics. The members of FG1 were naturally much more convinced that the label ‘Creature’ was fit to symbolically describe the status and the features of Paul Biya’s key-appointees. Αs one of the FG members observed, “not all the prominent leaders of the regime are Creatures” (Y.N., former minister’s chief of staff). Three criteria seemed essential: to have a “certain seniority, but not comparable to the one of Biya himself”, “to be directly appointed or sanctioned by Biya” (S.N., former adjunct press officer) and to “notoriously depend of the President’s will to be kept in office” (Y.N., former minister’s chief of staff). According to the FG1 participants, these characteristics are generally known not only by the party members, but also by those who pay attention to politics (journalists, officers, academia etc.), while the notion of Creature itself is “well known and spread, even among the public opinion” (J.-L.K., former councillor of a state undersecretary). On the other hand, some members of FG2 and FG3 observed that the notion of Creature “should not necessarily have a negative connotation” (G.B., party activist in the South). As the President is the Father of the Nation, being his Creature is, on a contrary, a “sacred unction”, which consequently imposes to its bearer a “holly duty” (A.A., party local vice-leader in the West). Because of the imperfections of representative democracy and because of the “unpreparedness of the People to make rational and valuable choices” (P.N., regional leadership member in the South), Cameroon needs a system of Creatures and this “system shows its efficiency”. Being also fully aware of the notoriety of the concept of Creature, some of the FG4 participants, while admitting that they militate in a rather politically hostile environment (especially in Douala, the second largest city in Cameroon and an opposition stronghold), believe that the proliferation of the idea that the RDPC is led by some “presidential super-appointees” (the Creatures), while the opposition leaders are widely elected by the citizens of the region, “hinders the capacity of the local party organizations to locally entrench the President’s discourse” (Y.S., party local official in Littoral). Consequently, while not denying the existence of the Creatures, they would prefer them to “vanish” from the regional public conscience, as the 59

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“effects of their presence are sometimes contrary to their intentions” (M.E., RDPC regional communication advisor in Littoral). The creatures as agents of structures’ articulation We had the opportunity to analyse and check the role of the Creatures within the clientelistic structures as sources of electoral mobilization through a series of specific questions and also through the debates taking place within the focus groups. A trend towards the inflation of the role and influence of the Creatures could be observed in the case of most FG1 and FG2 members. This could be explained as there is a correlation between the FG members’ own importance (as former collaborators of the Creatures or as their local/regional counterparts) and the Creatures’ personal importance and relevance within the establishment. On a contrary, most FG3 and especially most FG4 participants were inclined to underestimate the influence of the Creatures and to augment in this way their own degree of autonomy and their own proximity to the local decision-makers and voters. The structural role of the Creatures in the articulation and in the functioning of the clientelistic structures did not make the object of a consensus. Three of the FG1 members observed that the Creatures were able to use their key positions to “promise a specific allocation of resources in the immediately post-electoral periods” (G.T., former advisor of a ministerial director). Were such promises realistic? The FG1 semi-contradictory debates finally led to the consensual analysis according to which there were at least three situations: (a) the Creatures had (some) real influence over resource distribution and tried to keep their promises by exerting influence in favour of their local and/or regional clientele; (b) the Creatures presumably had some real influence but deceived their clientele and did not honour the promises made in exchange of electoral support; (c) the Creatures had no influence on resource allocation and their promises proved to be vain. Nevertheless, these postures were far from being clearly defined. As one of the FG1 participants said, “it was sometimes difficult even for us to understand in which of the three situations the Creatures (and implicitly us) were” (Y.N., former minister’s chief of staff). Regardless of their intentions and capacities, numerous participants of all the FGs concluded that the Creatures were the only high-ranking officials capable to fuel and to manipulate the patron-client relations in Cameroonian politics. At the same time, seen from the party militants’ perspective, the situation seems to be equally complicated. As a local regular activist observed, “While you generally know that the chieftain of a local community controls the votes of his people, you can’t be sure that he would keep his word” (M.D., militant in the West region). In what respect could he not keep his word? The FG3 members observe that the main strategy of ‘deception’ does not consist in promising ‘his’ votes to the RDPC and in fact giving them to some other candidate, “as this would be very easy to notice and to later punish” (O.O., deputy local leader in the West region). Instead, to promise a favourable vote for Paul Biya or for the party and then to stay home the day of the elections is a much safer and more subtle strategy. So, if fear of repercussions seems indeed to be high, local communities’ credulity is overrated: the response to Reprinted from the journal

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the sometimes limitless promises of the Creatures and of their local party militants is rather a conditioned kind of loyalty practiced by some local communities. On an even more pragmatic note, a FG4 participant quoted the former Prime Minister Achidi Achu when saying that “politics na ndjangui [politics is a tontine]" (W.M., member of a local party committee in the Littoral). In the logic of the tontine, only those who contribute are entitled to profit (Tcheuyap 2014, p. 219). This is the rationale of the give-and-take practice of clientelism: the voters have an interest in voting for the President in power as he has more means to reward their loyalty than the opposition candidates. But the tontine could also work the other way around: if not satisfied, if chronically deceived in their expectations, the voters would rather boycott the election, an attitude that is difficultly punishable by the governmental party officials, as “[…] in Cameroon, numerous reasons can always be invoked for not going to vote, from floods to superstitions” (B.P., former staff member of a state secretary). In this way, the local chieftains, the heads of family and the regular citizens inflict to the regime the only loss they can afford to inflict without retribution.

Overarching guardians and/or direct negotiators? There was no common view among the FG participants on the answer to this question, but rather a fruitful debate resulting into some more or less consensual conclusions. During the discussions, there was a permanent tension between, on one hand, the need of some participants to underline the ‘greatness’ of the Creatures, as a direct emanation of President’s will, and, on the other, to demonstrate their ability to talk with local influencers and voters and to persuade the latter to support the President. The first image of the Creatures as distant masters of the puppets, too highly placed to involve in the ‘vulgar’ business of negotiation with basic political agents and voters, is spread among numerous FG2 participants. As an early RDPC member observed, “[…] even if they don’t belong to the intimate inner circle of the President, they are to some extent his Chosen Ones” (T.K., local party committee member in the South). The Creature would be like “a Cardinal, spreading the President’s message to us, checking the state of the affairs in the provinces and in the villages, giving us highly valuable hints on what to do and how to speak to the people” (A.A., party local vice-leader in the West). The Creature could be a negotiator only when he/she would need to “appease the local or regional conflicts” and to impose the “rule of law” over some “occasionally dissident factions”. Some FG members brought several examples of Creatures (ministers, state secretaries, MPs, heads of the national police or general directors) who intervened in the name of President Biya to “restore the order” in several party local or departmental organizations where the clashes between the clientelistic local structures for the access to resources “was damaging the RDPC”. In all these cases, the Creatures rather acted as guardians of the presidential rule over the country’s territories and populations and as keepers of the system’s reproduction via classical exchange mechanisms (votes for money) at the macro and median levels. 61

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There is nevertheless a second image of the Creatures: they are top but “normal” political appointees who bargain over how much the government should spend “[…] to mobilize the local and regional voters’ owners in its favour” (D.L., former chief of staff of a state undersecretary). Some RDPC activists admit at their turn that the main expectation of the local party structures is to use the Creatures as assets to put the tribal chieftains, the neighbourhood clan leaders and the other local influencers “at work, to gather our voters” (K.K., local party treasurer, Littoral region). Given their experience, the Creatures “know that nothing is for free” and consequently “present what Yaoundé can offer in exchange of the political support” (T.P., regional vice-leader, West). The FG3 and FG4 members exposed two examples of secret meetings between local chieftains, religious leaders, mayors, councillors, on one hand, and prominent Creatures, on the other hand. In both cases, the Creatures, who were obviously the stars of the meetings, initiated the discussions by trying to emphasize the inner tensions within those communities and their roles of “peacemakers” via the “heavy investments” that they will procure and that “would change the lives of the inhabitants” (W.M., member of a local party committee in the Littoral). In one of these two cases, as the local public seemed to be discontent of the ensemble of the promises, the Creature “[…] targeted each of the various group representatives who attended the meeting and indirectly offered him/her specific bonuses should they boost their voters’ participation to the elections” (A.N., local party vice-leader in the West). These discussions included details such as the proofs that the local voters had to produce (generally by taking pictures of their ballots) and the measures of retaliation to be taken if the proofs were not conclusive enough or, worse, if there was some doubt about “cheating by not attending the poles or voting for other candidates” (A.N., local party vice-leader in the West). So, there is a fair amount of evidence to show that the Creatures act in some relevant occasions as direct negotiators within the core of the clientelistic Cameroonian structures.

Conclusions The focus group research offered the possibility to check our initial arguments, to draw a series of meaningful but partial conclusions over the way clientelism works in Cameroon and to finally make a series of observations about, among other aspects, the would–be directions of future research on the key actors of clientelistic practices. The first argument concerning the role of the Creatures as agents of clientelistic relationships’ articulation and structures’ mobilization was widely validated throughout the discussions of all the four FGs. Although aspects such as the opportunity of their interventions, the consistency of their promises or their capacity to satisfy their clients’ demands remained to some extent controversial, there was a general consensus that they benefited of a special status (‘the Chosen Ones’) and that they fulfilled a key-role as nodal points in articulating the clientelistic relations within and around the presidential party. Reprinted from the journal

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Further on, our argument that the Creatures are perceived as the guardians of the President’s will, imposing party discipline and allegiance to the decision-makers at the top level was only partially checked. As Paul Biya keeps signing decrees of nomination and rather commutes than fires the former holders of the respective positions (Bigombe Logo and Menthong 1996), there has been an inevitable inflation of Creatures and consequently a relative devaluation of their individual roles. But this did not diminish the well-entrenched behaviours of the regional and local party organizations, which are based on fear of control and traditional respect of hierarchies; thus, the Creatures are still perceived as the President’s ‘Cardinals’, being “the last ones you have the interest to upset” (U.I., regional party committee substitute in the South). Finally, the last assumption was that the Creatures were also negotiators between the central resource providers and the voters’ local influencers. The research allowed us to validate this presupposition and to observe in addition the Creatures’ chameleonic nature: in function of the needs, they act either as the all-mighty President’s satraps, who inforce his will and keep the party’s discipline, or as salesmen of the government’s promises, being occasionally obliged to directly negotiate the prices of the resources they are willing to trade for a certain number of votes in favour of the President. From a more general perspective, this research highlights some specific features of clientelism in semi-authoritarian regimes, at least in the Sub-Saharan African context. The uninterrupted continuity in power provides either the Presidents or the presidential dynasties with a variety of tools not only to control the power fluxes but also with a need to periodically refresh their networks of political-electoral influence. This explains the emergence and the development of the Creatures as a particular instrument of control and influence of the President and, as we saw, as agents of structural articulation for clientelism. This latter hypostasis of the Creatures opens for a wider possibility to analyse the clientelistic systems not merely as varieties of patron-client relations based on open negotiations but as complex pre-settled systems of domination where the extraction of the electoral support is rather hierarchic and often authoritative, leaving a limited marge of manoeuvre to the grass-root actors (as also implied by some comprehensive researches, such as the one conducted by Yonatan Morse (Morse 2018). In the light of our present inquiry, further research could concentrate on two important aspects. It could question the similarities and the differences in the way the clientelistic structures are built in relation with the central (semi-)authoritative power, exploring, for instance, the strategies of the voters’ local influencers to gain more autonomy in spite of the rigidity of the centralized control of the party in power (as also partially suggested in Leon 2011). Other investigations could cover the existence, the nature and the functions of the Creatures (or of their respective correspondents) in some other clientelistic systems but the Central African ones. This could enable us to determine the general processes of emergence of the intermediate agents in the clientelistic chains and to better map in this way the concrete types and modes of functioning of clientelism in different cultural and institutional traditions (as drafted in Schaffer 2007). Seen from this perspective, the Cameroonian case of clientelism could be used not as central-pivotal model but rather as an 63

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extreme yardstick that delineates the frontier between two kinds of mobilization: the semi-authoritarian but formally pluralist-electoral one and the dictatorial plebiscitelike variant of popular conscription. Open Access  This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creat​iveco​mmons​.org/licen​ ses/by/4.0/.

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S. Mişcoiu, L.-M. Kakdeu Lindberg, Staffan, and Minion Morrison. 2008. Are African voters really ethnic or clientelistic? Survey evidence from Ghana. Political Science Quarterly 123 (1): 95–122. Lust-Okar, Ellen. 2009. Legislative elections in hegemonic authoritairan regimes: competitive clientelism and resistance to democratization. In Democratization by elections: A new mode of transition?, ed. Staffan Lindberg, 226–245. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press. Malaquais, Dominique. 2002. Architecture, pouvoir et dissidence au Cameroun. Paris: Karthala. Médard, Jean-François. 2007. Nouveaux Acteurs Sociaux, Permanence et Renouvellement du Clientélisme Politique en Afrique Sub-saharienne. Cadernos de Estudos Africanos 13 (14): 11–26. Mişcoiu, Sergiu. 2012. Conclusion : les nouvelles démocraties à la quête de socialisation politique. Dorothé Cossi Sossa, ed. Nouvelles démocraties et socialisation politique. Etudes comparées des cas du Bénin, du Burkina Faso et de la Roumanie. Paris: L’Harmattan, 311–329. Mişcoiu, Sergiu. 2018. The New Wave of Presidential Authoritarianism in Francophone Sub-Saharan Africa. Transylvanian Review 27 (1): 119–130. Mişcoiu, Sergiu, and Kakdeu, Louis-Marie. 2019. Le clientélisme politique au Cameroun contemporain: Une enquête sur le fonctionnement des réseaux du pouvoir. Journal de la Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines Sais-Fès. 26(1). Morice, Alain. 2000. Recherches sur le paternalisme et le clientélisme contemporains : méthodes et interpretations. Ηabilitation Thesis. Paris: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. Morse, Yonatan L. 2018. Presidential power and democratization by elections in Africa. Democratization 25 (4): 709–727. Nkainfon Pefura, Samuel. 1996. Le Cameroun: Du multipartisme au multipartisme. Paris: L’Harmattan. Ndi, Anthony. 2014. Southern West Cameroon Revisited. Volume Two: North-South West Nexus 1858– 1972. Langaa: RPCIG. Obiang, Jean-François. 2007. France-Gabon: pratiques clientélaires et logiques d’État dans les relations franco-africaines. Paris: Karthala. Onana, Jean-Baptiste. 2005. Bamiléké vs Cameroun ? Outre-Terre 11 (2): 337–344. Osei, Anja. 2012. Party-Voter Linkage in Africa: Ghana and Senegal in Comparative Perspective. Wiesbaden: Springer. Owona, Joseph. 2015. Les systèmes politiques précoloniaux au Cameroun. Paris: L’Harmattan. Posner, D. 2005. Institutions and ethnic politics in Africa (Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pigeaud, Fanny. 2011. Au Cameroun de Paul Biya. Paris: Karthala. Piattoni, Simona. 2001. Clientelism, interests, and democratic representation: The European experience in historical and comparative perspective. Cambridge: University Press. Roniger, Luiz. 1994. Conclusions: the transformation of clientelism and civil society. In Democracy, clientelism, and civil society, ed. Luis Roniger and Ay.şe Güneş-Ayata, 207–214. Boulder: Lynne Riener Publishers. Ruiz de Elvira, and Laura Christoph H. Schwarz, and Irene Weipert-Fenner. 2019. Clientelism and Patronage in the Middle East and North Africa: Networks of Dependency. Oxford: Routledge. Schaffer, Frederic Charles, ed. 2007. Elections for sale: The causes and consequences of vote buying. Boulder: Lynne Reiner. Scott, J.C. 1972. Patron-client politics and political change in Southeast Asia. American Political Science Review 66: 91–113. Sembene, Daouda. 2015. Poverty, growth, and inequality in Sub-Saharan Africa: Did the walk match the talk under the PRSP approach?. International Monetary Fund Working Paper 15/122. Washington D.C.: IMF Siegel, David. 2017. Democratic institutions and political networks. In The Oxford handbook of political networks Jennifer Nicoll Victor, ed. Alexander H. Montgomery and Mark Lubell, 817–832. Oxford: University Press. Souaré, Issaka. 2017. Les partis politiques de l’opposition en Afrique: La quête du pouvoir. Montreal: University Press. Sy, Alpha Amadou. 2017. L’espace politique de l’Afrique francophone en question (vingt-cinq ans après le sommet de La Baule). Paris: L’Harmattan. Szwarcberg, Mariela. 2015. Mobilizing Poor Voters: Machine Politics, Clientelism, and Social Networks in Argentina. Cambridge: University Press. Tcheuyap, Alexie. 2014. Autoritarisme, presse et violence au Cameroun. Paris Karthala. Van de Walle , Nicolas. 2003. Presidentialism and Clientelism In Africa’s Emerging Party Systems. The Journal of Modern African Studies 41 (2): 297–321.

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Authoritarian clientelism: the case of the president’s… Van de Walle , Nicolas. 2014. The Democratization of Clientelism in Sub-Saharan Africa. In Clientelism, Social Policy, and the Quality of Democracy, ed. Diego Abente-Brun and Larry Diamond, 230–252. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Vicente, Pedro C., and Léonard. Wantchékon. 2009. Clientelism and vote buying: Lessons from field experiments in African elections. Oxford Review of Economic Policy 25 (2): 292–305. Volintiru, Clara. 2016. Clientelism and cartelization in post-communist Europe: the case of Romania. PhD thesis, The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Wantchékon, Léonard. 2003. Clientélisme électoral au Bénin: Résultats d’une étude expérimentale de terrain. Politique africaine 90 (2): 145–160.

Publisher’s Note  Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Sergiu Mişcoiu  is Ph.D. Professor of Political Science at the Faculty of European Studies, Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca (Romania) where he chairs the Centre for International Cooperation and the Centre for African Studies. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science (University of Paris-East), a second one in History (Babes-Bolyai University), and a habilitation in Political Science (University of Paris-East). His main research interests are the constructivist and the alternative theories applied to the nation building processes, to populism and to the political transformations of the European and African public spaces. Louis‑Marie Kakdeu  is a research associate at the Centre for African Studies at Babes-Bolyai University, Romania, and is active in several African universities in Côte d’Ivoire, Cameroon, Guinea and Senegal. His is a specialist of discourse theory and is interested in politics in Central and West Africa. His publications focus on the quality of democracy in Francophone Africa, political discourse and intercultural communication.

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Acta Politica (2021) 56:658–676 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-020-00187-z ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Coordinating the machine: subnational political context and the effectiveness of machine politics Inga A.‑L. Saikkonen1  Accepted: 2 December 2020 / Published online: 19 March 2021 © The Author(s) 2021

Abstract Political machines use state resources to win elections in many developing democracies and electoral autocracies. Recent research has noted that the coordination of machine politics can be much more complex and problem-prone than previously thought. Yet, the role that the subnational political context plays in solving these coordination problems has largely been neglected in the comparative literature. This article seeks to fill this gap and suggests that control over the local administration is an important variable that shapes the effectiveness of authoritarian machine politics. We exploit the great institutional and political variation within one of the most prominent electoral authoritarian regimes of today, the Russian Federation, to test the empirical implications of the theory with detailed local level electoral and socio-economic data as well as multilevel regression models. The empirical results highlight the importance of subnational political structures in supporting electoral authoritarian regimes. Keywords  Clientelism · Machine politics · Electoral manipulation · Subnational politics · Russia

Introduction In many developing democracies and electoral autocracies political machines1 use state resources2 to win elections. Burgeoning literature has studied the role that clientelism and machine politics play in many elections around the world (Gherghina 2013; Hicken 2011; Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007; Stokes 2005; 1

  Political machines are (informal) organizations that seek to influence electoral outcomes by e.g. driving up electoral turnout or vote for a particular party/candidate. They are headed by a patron and consist of a web of lower level agents, ‘brokers’. 2   Such as fiscal resources, or access to welfare services and state jobs.

* Inga A.‑L. Saikkonen [email protected] 1



Social Science Research Institute, Åbo Akademi University, 20500 Turku, Finland

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Stokes et al. 2013). Yet, recent research has also noted that clientelistic electoral strategies are by no means cost-free nor necessarily that efficient as they require complex delegation and coordination at several levels of the electoral ‘machine’. Recent literature has highlighted these problems, and shown that the agents conducting electoral manipulation can be very unreliable (Szwarcberg 2012a, b, 2013; Stokes et  al. 2013; Camp et  al. 2014; Larreguy et  al. 2016; Rundlett and Svolik 2016; Camp 2017). The coordination of machine politics is thus shown to present a set of complex principal-agent problems for political leaders. How do political machines mitigate these delegation issues? The extant literature has only begun to probe these questions. Existing studies have shown that political machine leaders seek to monitor the agents conducting the manipulation, and reward and sanction them for good performance (Kynev et al. 2012; Szwarcberg 2012a, b; Larreguy et al. 2016). However, less attention has been paid on factors that would make this monitoring and the reward/punishment regime effective. The conduct of electoral manipulation is fundamentally a local phenomenon (Rundlett and Svolik 2016). Electoral manipulation thus always takes place in a particular local and subnational environment. These settings are governed by powerful local patrons who coordinate and monitor the conduct of machine politics in their designated area, and can reward/punish lower level agents on the basis of their results (such as polling station level electoral returns). Despite this, comparative literature has until now largely neglected the role that the local political context and subnational arrangements plays in shaping machine politics effectiveness, although the emerging spatial work on electoral manipulation has shown that the intensity and types of electoral manipulation can exhibit very distinct local geographical patterns within countries (Cantu 2017; Skovoroda and Lankina 2017). This article seeks to fill this gap and suggests that the structure of the local state administration is an important variable that shapes the effectiveness of the coordination of electoral manipulation, and that it explains why we see considerable differences between machine politics effectiveness between different subnational areas in countries. Building on (neo)institutional literature on politics and the economics of organization literature, this article tests two sets of causal explanations on how the local political context could shape machine politics effectiveness. First, many authoritarian states, including the Soviet Union, have found hierarchically structured bureaucracies and local government organizations as effective means of organizing governance (on this, see, e.g., Roeder 1993). The first hypothesis tested in this article probes the effectiveness of hierarchically organized local administrations structures in coordinating machine politics effectiveness. Second, we test how more informal means of control, such as the local principal’s tenure in office, shape the coordination of machine politics. The article exploits the great institutional and political variation within one of the most prominent electoral authoritarian regimes of today, the Russian Federation, to test the empirical implications with detailed local level electoral and socio-economic data as well as multilevel regression models. The results show that hierarchically appointed local administration structures are very effective in machine politics mobilization. Overall, the findings of this article highlight the importance of subnational politics in stabilizing electoral authoritarian regimes. 69

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The findings of this article contribute to the emerging literature on agency problems in machine politics coordination (Szwarcberg 2012a, b, 2013; Stokes et  al. 2013; Camp et al. 2014; Larreguy et al. 2016; Camp 2017).3 Moreover, this article is one of the first studies to highlight the role that the subnational political context plays in solving the agency problems in machine politics delegation,4 and shows that it has a powerful effect on electoral manipulation effectiveness.

Coordination problems and machine politics effectiveness Authoritarian leaders have a broader set of electoral strategies to choose from than democratic politicians. In addition to electoral strategies used also in democracies, such as political business cycles and targeted public spending, authoritarian incumbents can also resort to vote buying, voter intimidation5 and electoral fraud to maintain power. However, recent literature has begun to question the effectiveness of these strategies. Recent studies have shown that electoral manipulation suffers from delegation and coordination problems as the actual vote buying/manipulation needs to be delegated to a complex web of lower level agents (brokers). This delegation is risky and can lead to highly suboptimal targeting of vote buying/electoral manipulation (see, e.g., Stokes et al. 2013; Rundlett and Svolik 2016). The organization of machine politics—how to coordinate complex hierarchies of local agents and make them comply with potentially illegal activities—thus presents a rather thorny principal-agent problem for political leaders. Despite these agency problems, electoral fraud and clientelism are still frequently used in many autocracies and new democracies in the world. How do political machines solve these delegation issues? Emerging comparative literature has begun to probe these questions. In some cases, such as in Argentina, clientelistic exchanges are coordinated by institutionalized mass parties and the career incentives within the party mitigate the problem of broker shirking (Szwarcberg 2012a, b).6 Yet, recent literature has shown that principal-agent problems can abound even in such conditions, and that brokers, even when they are co-partisans, tend to be unreliable agents of the party patrons (Stokes et al. 2013). Moreover, in many of the countries in the world (and in many historical cases) machine politics is not primarily conducted via a disciplined network of party

3

  While most of the literature on clientelism examines the horizontal relationships between the brokers and the clients, or more recently, between the machine leaders and the brokers, emerging literature has also begun to examine other horizontal clientelistic mechanisms, such as the relationship between political parties and private contributors (see Gherghina and Volintiru 2017). 4   For an exception, see Larreguy et al. (2015), who examine how the location of polling stations affects the ability of machine leaders to monitor the work of political brokers. 5   That is, threatening the voters with sanctions such as losing their jobs or access to welfare benefits if they vote the ‘wrong’ way (see, e.g., Mares and Young 2016). 6   In Argentina, brokers are local, partisan councillors whose electoral fortunes depend partly on their patrons, creating incentives to ‘work’ for the party. However, as Szwarcberg (2012a, b) notes, even these incentives do not fully prevent broker shirking.

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operatives, but machine leaders leaders have to rely on local notables to coordinate voter intimidation and electoral fraud on their behalf (Ziblatt 2009; Frye et al. 2014; Mares and Zhu 2015; Forrat 2018).7 For example, even in Mexico, with a strong institutionalized mass party (PRI), the actual conduct of machine politics appears to be contracted to non-partisan local operatives who have more information about the local conditions than the party operatives (Larreguy et al. 2016). How do political leaders then discipline the work of these local operatives in the absence of formal coordinating institutions? Most comparative studies suggest that political machines tend to rely on ‘classic’ solutions to principal-agent problems (see, e.g., Moe 1984), such as by monitoring the work of local brokers and punishing and rewarding the local agents accordingly. Political machines are known to spend considerable resources on broker monitoring (on this, see, e.g., Camp 2017). Most commonly, machine leaders appear to use polling station level electoral returns to monitor the efficiency of the brokers in delivering votes (for evidence from Mexico, Russia, Argentina and Venezuela, see Kynev et al. 2012; Stokes et al. 2013; Larreguy et al. 2016), and use various rewards and punishments to control the work of the local intermediaries. For example, in Argentina, effective brokers are rewarded by electoral assistance, and in Russia, municipal leaders can be promoted on the basis of electoral performance in ‘their’ localities (Kynev et  al. 2012; Szwarcberg 2012a, b). Officials higher up in the government hierarchy, such as subnational governors, can also be monitored for their ability to deliver votes for the regime (for evidence from Russia, see Reuter and Robertson 2012; Reisinger and Moraski 2017). Thus, political leaders in various contexts seem to be keenly aware of the agency problems in machine politics and seek to mitigate these by actively monitoring the ability of lower level agents to deliver votes for the machine. What are the factors that shape the effectiveness of this monitoring and reward/ punishment regime? The conduct of electoral manipulation is fundamentally a local phenomenon (Rundlett and Svolik 2016). Electoral manipulation thus always takes place in a particular local and subnational environment. These settings are governed by powerful local patrons who coordinate and monitor the conduct of machine politics in their designated area, and can reward/punish lower level agents on the basis of their results (such as polling station level electoral returns, as noted above). Despite this, comparative literature has until now largely neglected the role that the local political context and subnational arrangements plays in shaping machine politics effectiveness. This can be especially salient in large federal states where the local administration can be arranged in different ways. This article seeks to fulfil that gap and suggests that the subnational setting is an important variable that shapes the effectiveness of the coordination of electoral manipulation, and that it explains why we see considerable differences between machine politics effectiveness between different subnational areas in countries. This article builds on the institutionalist literature on politics and tests two sets of causal explanations of the role that different types of subnational political settings may play in coordinating machine politics. We

7   Such as local officials in historical Prussia (Ziblatt 2009), or employers in today’s Russia (Frye et al. 2014).

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investigate the role that a hierarchical way of structuring the local government institutions and the more informal ways of controlling the local level agents, such as the principal’s tenure, have on machine politics effectiveness.

Machine politics in Russia Russian federal elections have become increasingly uncontested from the early 2000s onwards. Electoral manipulation has played an important part in Russian elections (see, e.g. Myagkov et al. 2009; Mebane and Kalinin 2010). Most of the current scholarship argues that electoral mobilization in Russia is mostly focused on driving up electoral turnout and mobilizing particular ‘malleable’ sectors of the population to the polls, such as or rural and socio-economically vulnerable sectors of the population (see Hale 2003; Allina-Pisano 2010; Kynev et  al. 2012; Frye, et  al. 2014). Common non-programmatic methods of mobilizing the ‘right’ sectors to the polls involve electoral intimidation at the workplace or at universities, or voter intimidation targeting the elderly and other vulnerable sets of population, in particularly in rural areas (see, e.g. Kynev et al. 2012; OSCE/ODIHR 2012; Frye et al. 2014; Harvey 2016). Socio-economic dependency on the state makes these sectors of people susceptible to voter intimidation, and they are often reliant on state-controlled media (especially state TV) for their political information (Kynev et  al. 2012). Electoral results can also be augmented by outright electoral fraud, such as the falsification of final vote counts or ballot box stuffing (on the latter, see Myagkov et al. 2005, 2009; Goodnow et al. 2014). Both of these methods of electoral manipulation require careful delegation at several levels of the state administrative machine. Machine politics in Russia have developed on a distinctly non-partisan basis, and subnational and local administration structures play an important role in coordinating voter mobilization. The responsibility of ‘delivering’ votes on behalf of the Kremlin was delegated to the largely non-partisan Russian subnational political machines in the early 2000s (see, e.g., Hale 2003; Reuter and Remington 2009; Golosov 2013). The Russian Federal Centre recognized the need to gain the support of the powerful regional political machines in elections already in the 1990s (Reuter 2017). However, the Kremlin was able to gain their support only gradually in the early 2000s after “the surge in oil prices, a growing economy and Putin’s high popularity ratings [had] strengthened the federal center vis-à-vis the regional elites” (Reuter 2017, p. 107; see also Golosov 2013). The process of the Kremlin gaining the upper hand over the regional elites culminated in the removal of the gubernatorial elections after the Beslan hostage crisis in 2003 (although the governors also obtained some smaller concessions from the centre in return, see Reuter 2017). Several studies have shown that the Russian regional governors are held accountable for their success in mobilizing votes for the Kremlin in federal elections (Reuter and Robertson 2012; Reisinger and Moraski 2017). Regional governors on their turn are known to delegate voter mobilization to powerful local ‘meso-elites’, such as mayors or powerful ‘rayon’ (‘county’) heads, who control ‘sub-pyramids’ of local brokers (Matzusato 2001a, b; Buzin et  al. 2012; Sharafutdinova 2013). The rayon heads control the lower level brokers, such Reprinted from the journal

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as state-connected enterprise managers (Frye et al. 2014), managers of the former state farms (Allina-Pisano 2010), or other local notables, such as doctors and teachers (Forrat 2018), who can be bribed/coerced into participating in electoral commissions with offers of money and threats of losing their jobs. Post-Soviet machine politics is thus conducted via a multi-layered ‘pyramid’ with complex chains of delegation. Yet, the effectiveness of machine politics has varied markedly between and within the subnational regions in Russia (Hale 2003; Reisinger and Moraski 2017). What accounts for this variation in the subnational machines’ ability to ‘deliver’ votes? The next section proposes two sets of theoretical explanations accounting for this variation.

Varieties in sub‑national political organization and machine politics effectiveness in Russia Different types of organizations tend to function most effectively when they are arranged in a hierarchical setting, and the economics of organization literature has long noted that most firms tend to be organized in a hierarchical manner (for a discussion, see Moe 1984). Various authoritarian states have also found that the power of appointment and removal are highly efficient ways of controlling lower level agents. For example, the nonmenklatura system functioned as an effective means of organizational control in the Soviet Union. As Roeder has noted, “[t]he key to [bureaucratic] control [in the Soviet Union] was the accountability of bureaucratic personnel to the Central Committee through its powers of appointment and removal” (Roeder 1993, p. 46). The control over the appointment and removal of the personnel should be especially powerful in an authoritarian setting where legal arbitrariness means that appointments and promotions are often highly politicized (Gehlbach and Simpser 2015). Direct subnational appointments provide more manageable ‘chains of command’ at the local level, and make the local officials directly ‘beholden’ to their higher-up patrons. Electoral manipulation, too, should be much more efficient to coordinate in settings with a directly appointed subnational administration with direct ‘chains of command’. Therefore, we hypothesize that: Hypothesis 1  Machine politics is likely to be more effective and the share of proregime votes higher in subnational localities where local administration structures are hierarchically appointed. The second informal aspect which should affect the degree of uncertainty in a subnational political setting is the length of incumbency of the subnational political patron. Governance systems in authoritarian settings are highly personalised (Hale 2015), and thus the tenure of key personnel should affect the stability of the local organizational setting markedly. A longer tenure by the local incumbent should create informal networks and settled hierarchies that can regularize and coordinate the 73

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workings of local organizations. Therefore another subnational setting in which machine politics coordination should be more effective is established strongholds where the local patron has been in power for a long time. These settings should feature more developed informal hierarchies that coordinate the local political processes. Thus the second hypothesis tested in this article is: Hypothesis 2 Machine politics is likely to more effective and the share of proregime votes is likely to be higher in subnational localities where the subnational incumbent has been in power for longer.

Empirical approach and data Subnational institutional variation in Russia The Russian Federation presents a particularly useful case to investigate the effects of variation in subnational administrative structures as there has been considerable differences in both the formal and informal ways that the Russian regional and municipal politics have been organized. In the 2000s, all local level government structures were meant to be popularly elected. However, a small number of subnational leaders, ‘governors’, recognized the advantage of hierarchical local administration systems, and resisted the central government’s calls for local elections (on this, see, e.g., Brie 2004; Lankina 2004). For example, the most important local government officials, the local mayors, were directly appointed by the local governor in around 14% of the Russian subnational areas, ‘regions’ (Gel’man and Lankina 2008), but remained elected in other subnational regions.8 From the mid-2000s onwards the Russian Federal Centre’s “initiatives to recentralize power resulted in the cancellation of direct elections in just under half of all cities” (Buckley et al. 2014, p. 91). There were also great differences in the tenure of the Russian local governors before the cancellation of the gubernatorial elections in 2004. Some local executives, such as the President of Tatarstan, Minitimer Shaimiev, had held supreme power in their subnational units since the Soviet times,9 whereas other regions, such as Smolensk Oblast, had very unsettled ‘elite situations’ and frequent changes in governorship.

8

  These types of arrangements were more common in titular republics, but emerged also in some nonethnic regions, such as Orel Oblast and Moscow City (see, e.g., Brie 2004). 9   Mintimer Shaimiev acted as the republic’s president until 2010 when he was appointed as the State Counselor of the Republic of Tatarstan.

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Data Dependent variables We specify a series of multilevel models where our outcomes of interest are electoral turnout and the vote share for the winning candidate in the 2004, 2008 and 2012 presidential elections in Russia to test the theoretical hypotheses. Thus the effectiveness of the local political machines is operationalised by the share of proregime votes in a series of Russian elections. The winning candidates in these elections were Vladimir Putin in the 2004 and the 2008 elections and Dmitry Medvedev in the 2012 presidential contest.10 Electoral turnout serves as an important indicator of regime performance in authoritarian regimes, as low electoral turnout can signal ‘latent’ dissatisfaction with the regime (Magaloni 2006). Therefore electoral mobilization in Russia focuses on both driving up electoral turnout as well as mobilizing votes for pro-regime candidates (on turnout mobilization see, e.g., Kynev et al. 2012; Frye et al. 2014). Independent variables We use original socio-economic and institutional data from Russia aggregated at both the region and county (rayon) levels to test the theoretical expectations.11 Hypothesis 1 expects machine politics to be more effective in subnational settings where the local administration has been hierarchically appointed rather than popularly elected, which is operationalized by a dichotomous variable (Hierarch Admin) which indicates whether the local mayors were hierarchically appointed (coded “1”) or elected in a given region.12 Hypothesis 2 expects that a longer gubernatorial tenure would be associated with more effective machine politics, and this is operationalized by the number of years the governor has been in power in the given region

10   The electoral data comes from the CD-rom “Rossiiskie vybory v tsifrakh i kartakh. 1995–2007” as well as the website of the Central Electoral Commission of Russia. 11   The dataset combines electoral data with Russian 2002 census data. The lowest level at which both electoral and census data is available is at the rayon (‘county’) level. The rayons (‘counties’) are nested within the larger administrative units (‘regions’). A small number of rayons had to be excluded due to redistricting or missing data. The results presented here include observations from all the regions that consistent time-series institutional and economic indicators are available for, i.e. 19 titular republics, 6 krays and 49 oblasts. 12   The variable was coded from the data presented in Buckley et al. (2014) which represents the most up-to-date and comprehensive indices on the Russian local government appointment structures. The variable was coded as “1” if the mayors of regional capitals—the most important power centers in the region—were appointed in the period in the run-up to the 2004/2008/2012 elections.

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(Tenure).13 The explanatory variables are measured at the regional level and are expected to have a positive association with the outcome variables. Main control variables Our models include several control variables at both the region and rayon levels, drawn from both the Russia-specific and comparative literature. The models include two sets of regional level controls. Economic growth is shown to be continually associated with better electoral performance of the Russian regime in several studies (see e.g. Treisman 2011), and thus the models control for the lagged GRP per capita growth at the regional level, with data from the Russian Federal Service for State Statistics, Goskomstat. Previous literature also suggests that delegation problems are likely to be greater in larger regions (Hale 2003) and the models control for the size of the region operationalized by the number of rayons per region. The models also include several variables measured at the rayon level that are shown to be powerful predictors of electoral turnout and voting behaviour in Russian elections. Previous studies show that the regime performs better in rayons with high levels of rural inhabitants and non-Russian electorate (Clem and Craumer 1997, 2000; Goodnow et  al. 2014; Reisinger and Moraski 2017; Saikkonen 2017, 2019; White 2016; White and Saikkonen 2017), and the models include controls for the share of agricultural workers, and the percentage of non-Russian people at the rayon level. Pensioners are also thought to be particularly pliable for voter mobilization in Russia due to their dependence on state transfers, and their socialization in electoral participation under the Soviet regime (Hale 2003), and thus the models control for the percentage of pensioners per rayon. Political machines also target poor and state-dependent voters (see, e.g., Calvo and Murillo 2004; Stokes 2005), and thus the models include the share of people per rayon who receive government transfers. In addition, the models control for the education profile of the locality (see e.g. Colton 2000). The models also control for rayon size, which is operationalized by the number of registered voters per rayon (logged), as voter monitoring is likely to be easier in smaller and socially more integrated communities (Stokes 2005). Numerous studies have shown that Russian elections have become increasingly fraudulent in the 2000s (see, e.g. Mebane and Kalinin 2010; Myagkov et al. 2005, 2009). Following the literature on electoral manipulation in Russia that uses turnout thresholds as an indirect indictor of fraud and ballot-box stuffing (Goodnow et al. 2014; White 2016) we use a dichotomous indicator of fraud that assesses whether rayonlevel electoral turnout is greater than 1.5 standard deviations above the rayon-level

13

  The variable measures the length of an individual’s tenure as the effective head of the region. Most governors became heads of the region when they were either elected as governors or appointed to the position by President Yeltsin. However, in some cases, the local executives had been in power longer than this. For example, the president of Tatarstan, Mintimer Shaimiev, had ruled Tatarstan since 1989, when he was elected as the first secretary of Tatarstan Communist Party’s regional committee (which then held supreme power in the region). The variable was coded until the year 2004 as after that the regional governors lost their political independence and begun to be appointed by the federal centre. The data was collated from McFaul and Petrov (1998), Orttung et al. (2000) and online sources.

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Coordinating the machine: subnational political context…

national average. While most indicators of electoral fraud always contain a variable amount of ‘noise’, this indicator has been shown to capture instances of ballot-box stuffing rather well in numerous recent empirical studies (Goodnow et  al. 2014; White 2016).

Results The statistical analysis is conducted by estimating hierarchical linear (random intercepts) models. Multilevel models take into account the nested nature of the data, and they are especially suited to test the effects of variables at two levels (Rabe-Hesketh and Skrondal 2005). The main empirical results are presented in Table 1. The results offer strong support for the hypothesis (Hypothesis 1) that machine politics would be more effective in non-elected subnational settings. The results from Models 1 to 6 suggest that association between the hierarchically appointed local administration structures and pro-regime electoral results remains robust and highly statistically significant throughout the various models. The effect sizes are also substantive. For example, the results regarding the 2004 presidential elections (M1 and M2) suggest that the vote share for Vladimir Putin was almost 5 percentage points higher, ceteris paribus, in regions where local administration officials were hierarchically appointed from above, and that electoral turnout was almost 7 percentage points higher in similar settings. It is notable that we find such substantive effects in models that control for a host of other powerful covariates, including the proxy for electoral fraud. Models 1 and 2 also test Hypothesis 2. Since the Russian governors lost their independent power positions in 2004 it makes sense to test Hypothesis 2 only with data running up to 2004. The results do not offer much support for Hypothesis 2, that is, that the governor’s tenure would have an effect on machine politics effectiveness. These results suggest that the formal mechanisms of subordinate control are more effective in political machine control than the more informal mechanisms. In terms of the other control variables, the results are mostly in line with the findings of previous studies. Table  2 presents a robustness check of the previous results using an alternative indicator on the independence of local administration structures. These models are run with an indicator measuring the independence of local administration bodies in Russia (Local Gov). This indicator comes from the widely used Index of Democracy, an expert rating of democratization in the Russian regions.14 The direction of the coefficient is expected to be negative. The results are largely robust to the use of this alternative indicator, apart from the coefficient in Model 1 that fails to achieve statistical significance, but is to the expected direction. All the other coefficients are statistically significant.

14   The indicators are available at Petrov and Titkov. “Indeks demokratichnosti.” Sotsial’nyi atlas rossiyskikh regionov, accessed at http://​atlas.​socpol.​ru/​index​es/​index_​democr.​shtml.

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Reprinted from the journal

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0.001 (0.030)

 − 0.846*** (0.184)

 − 0.168** (0.053)

9.676*** (0.631)

  Benefits

  Rayon size

  High Ed

  Fraud04

 − 0.110* (0.054)

 − 1.234*** (0.187)

0.043 (0.030)

0.037 (0.040)

  Constant

 sigma_e

  Constant

 sigma_u

Random effects

5.007*** (0.080)

6.400*** (0.548) 5.573*** (0.089)

7.067*** (0.615)

5.112*** (0.082)

5.761*** (0.504)

6.416*** (0.103)

7.336*** (0.636)

4.632*** (0.074)

5.446*** (0.473)

79.04*** (3.055)

  Constant

93.42*** (4.675)

9.029*** (0.555)

  Fraud12 79.73*** (3.692)

 − 0.062 (0.157)

 − 0.260*** (0.049)

 − 1.377*** (0.170)

0.105*** (0.027)

 − 0.050 (0.036)

0.065*** (0.009)

4.954** (1.890)

9.193*** (0.790)

 − 0.326 (0.177)

5.702* (2.407)

0.113 (0.067)

 − 3.493*** (0.235)

0.076* (0.038)

0.083 (0.050)

0.060*** (0.012)

 − 0.032 (0.091)

 − 0.001 (0.048)

Putin12

Model 5

  GRPpc growth1112 88.69*** (3.906)

10.50*** (0.709)

0.217*** (0.058)

 − 3.665*** (0.205)

0.103** (0.033)

0.113** (0.044)

0.049*** (0.010)

0.601*** (0.126)

0.066 (0.064)

Turnout08

Model 4

  Hierarch Admin12

86.28*** (3.520)

 − 0.216*** (0.039)

  Pensioners

0.051*** (0.011)

 − 0.101 (0.100)

 − 0.047 (0.050)

9.940*** (0.631)

0.0280** (0.010)

  Non Russ

1.091*** (0.109)

0.026 (0.062)

  Fraud08

 − 0.263** (0.099)

  Agr Empl

0.088 (0.073)

 − 0.105 (0.139)

 − 0.114* (0.056)

  Region size

0.371 (0.212)

5.620** (1.893)

0.007 (0.066)

  GRPpc growth0304

6.826** (2.246)

  GRPpc growth0708

0.245 (0.192)

Medvedev08

Model 3

  Hierarch Admin08

4.982* (2.032)

  Tenure

Turnout04

Putin04

  Hierarch Admin04

 Region level

Fixed effects

Model 2

Model 1

Table 1  Multilevel analysis of the winning candidate’s vote share and electoral turnout in the 2004, 2008 and 2012 presidential elections

5.155*** (0.083)

5.930*** (0.514)

69.94*** (3.362)

14.13*** (0.616)

 − 0.165 (0.171)

4.715* (2.060)

0.494*** (0.054)

 − 1.944*** (0.189)

0.0631* (0.030)

0.161*** (0.040)

0.061*** (0.010)

0.497*** (0.101)

0.065 (0.052)

Turnout12

Model 6

I. A.-L. Saikkonen

2027

12,663

BIC

*p