17 established by the leader. This is key, because in a setting where the programmatic promises of rulers include infrastructure development, better schools or improved environmental quality, the ability of party members to act collectively to enforce those promises has spillover benefits for citizens more generally.

# **The development effects of political party organization**

The foregoing discussion indicates that political parties in both democracies and non-democracies differ in the degree to which their organization supports collective action by party members. In particular, parties seeking to mobilize support on the basis of programmatic commitments, either in democratic or non-democratic settings, must allow party members to act collectively. Otherwise, leader incentives to shirk in their pursuit of the party program render it non-credible and the program ineffective as a mobilizing device. Successful machine parties also allow members to act collectively to restrain leader shirking, though they confront significant obstacles to using this organizational endowment to make programmatic appeals. In contrast, patron-client parties have no capacity at all to make programmatic appeals.

If the analysis is correct and patron-client parties are the only parties that are systematically incapable of make credible commitments to pursue policies in the broader public interest, then we should observe an association between the presence of such parties and the lower quality of public policies and development outcomes, in both democratic and non-democratic settings.

Evidence on these implications is difficult to assemble, since data on whether parties exhibit leader monitoring of member contributions and member collective action to restrain leader shirking are not available. However, Keefer (2011) exploits several characteristics of parties, for which time-series data are available, that plausibly capture the degree to which parties are organized to better promote the collective interests of members. One of these, from the Database of Political Institutions (Beck, et al. 2001), is whether parties can be characterized as espousing economic policies that are left (more redistributionist), right, or centrist; or whether instead the party has no stance on these issues and, instead, seems to exist to further the ambitions of the party leader.

The coding of the DPI is based on descriptions of the party in a number of longrunning almanacs. The coding rules do not require the enumerators to identify the organizational characteristics of the party (on which the descriptions in the almanacs are, in any case, silent). However, the foregoing argument is that parties can only sustain a programmatic reputation for pursuing broad public policies along the left-right spectrum if they allow members to remove leaders who diverge from the policies and delegate to leaders the right to sanction members who do not contribute to the party’s pursuit of these policies.

The coding is generous: 71 percent of the largest governing parties are coded as programmatic. However, among poorer countries, only 58 percent are coded with a programmatic stance, compared to 83 percent in richer countries (91 percent and 71 percent in the case of richer and poorer countries that exhibit competitive elections). Moreover, the generosity is in the direction of attributing programmatic character to parties (such as machine parties) that may not be sufficiently well organized to make credible programmatic commitments to voters. That is, parties that are not coded as programmatic can be reliably