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# **Isn’t clientelism everywhere?**

This discussion emphasizes that a key difference between programmatic and clientelist parties is the organizational characteristics of programmatic parties that allow them to make credible commitments to broad public policies. Of course, any simple typology of parties masks the complexity of real world partisan organization. Hagopian (2007) summarizes evidence indicating that, whether one looks at self-reported citizen identification with parties or swings in party vote-shares from one election to the next, emerging democracies exhibit significantly lower and higher rates, respectively, than those in industrialized countries. The preceding argument offers one explanation for this: in countries dominated by patron-client parties, which are more likely to be emerging than industrialized democracies, the ease with which patron-candidates can switch and establish new parties renders parties unstable. However, Hagopian (2007) underlines that this, or any other single explanation, is unlikely to explain all cases.

In Russia, for example, during a period of extreme party flux, voting decisions reflected most strongly citizens’ views on issues rather than candidates. One explanation for this, consistent with the core argument in this essay, is that where ideology is highly salient to voters, and candidates can establish a personal commitment to the ideology, voters can rationally base their votes on ideology even when those candidates are not organized into parties that can make credible programmatic appeals.

Hagopian notes as well that parties make clientelist appeals in some parts of a country and programmatic appeals elsewhere, and that ideologically committed party representatives can also be effective representatives of narrow constituent interests. Certainly, it is well-known that even programmatic parties do not abjure clientelism and its candidates may still make “empty promises” – promises that are infeasible to implement. Targeted payoffs to key constituencies are a staple of politics in North American and European democracies. Politicians in these democracies also often make clearly noncredible policy promises on issues ranging from job creation to the elimination of waste in government to the reversal of global warming, to signal their broader policy preferences.

However, in contrast to politicians in countries that lack programmatic parties, they can credibly commit to policies that differ from those advanced by competing parties. Republicans who embrace higher taxes or Democrats who oppose abortion face larger sanctions from within their parties than do their counterparts in countries that lack programmatic parties.<sup>5</sup> One way to see the importance of the difference is to observe interparty variation in partisans’ preferences on key issues. If programmatic parties can make credible commitments to broad policies that party supporters care about, supporters should exhibit systematically different preferences regarding “programmatic” issues. Where credible policy differences are not in evidence, there should be no association between voters’ policy preferences and their partisan inclinations.

In the United States, in a survey of 2,369 voters in February 2002, Republican and Democratic voters expressed significantly different preferences regarding tax cuts that were consistent with their party affiliation. Fifty-five percent of Republican-leaning respondents

> 5 Of course, this makes compromise difficult when the programmatic gulf is large, as American politics in 2012 demonstrate.  However, negotiation between competing parties is potentially even harder when neither is programmatic and there are weak political incentives to solve broad policy problems.