surprisingly bad at detecting when others are lying, even when they are trained to do so (Grohol 1999, Kohnken 1987, Kraut and Poe 1980). In addition, clientelism persists in many places where well-organized political machines do not operate. Thus, difficulties in monitoring and sanctioning voters continue to pose a serious challenge to instrumentalist theories of clientelism. Given the theoretical and practical problems with enforcement of the clientelist bargain through external monitoring, we propose that machine politics can be supported by a psychological mechanism rooted in norms of reciprocity. Specifically, we argue that the receipt of gifts, favors, services, or protection creates feelings of obligation among voters, who then spontaneously support their political patrons. Under such circumstances, clientelism is This norms-based approach to clientelism has roots in certain ethnographic studies from anthropology, sociology, and political science that emphasize the embeddedness of relationships between patrons and clients and the “moral economy” of exchanges between the two (Boissevain 1966, Wolf 1969, Powell 1970, Scott 1972, Lemarchand and Legg 1972, Johnson 1974, Scott 1976, Eisenstadt and Lemarchand 1981, Lomnitz 1982 , Chubb 1982, Komito 1984, Roniger and Günes-Ayata 1994, Gay 1994, Fox 1994, Auyero 2001, Calvo and Murillo 2004, Gay 2006, Krishna 2007, Schaffer and Schedler 2007). These largely descriptive studies have routinely emphasized norms of reciprocity as the basis for clientelist exchanges, but they lack a plausible psychological micro-foundation that is as conceptually well-grounded as the instrumentalist underpinnings of principal-agent models of vote-buying. We show that norms of reciprocity create a separate foundation for machine politics. The sense of obligation that brokers create through the provision of selective benefits can help politicians build clientelist networks even in the context of ballot secrecy. One implication is that clientelism may be much more entrenched than existing analyses would lead us to believe and
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