Incentivizing Brokers in Clientelist Parties

Agustin Casas () and Daniel M. Kselman
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Daniel M. Kselman: School Global and Public Affairs/IE University

No 150, Working Papers from Red Nacional de Investigadores en Economía (RedNIE)

Abstract: Local brokers are essential in the implementation of clientelist politics, but their efforts on parties’ behalf are not fully observable. A growing literature studies how parties address this agency problem, highlighting two distinct reward schemes:allocating promotions or prizes based on observed vote shares, or doing so based on inferred effort allocations. This paper develops a formal model to examine the conditions under which one or the other of these reward schemes is optimal forminimizing brokers’ rent-seeking. Intuitively, the effort-based reward mechanism is optimal when broker effort is inferred with relative precision. Less intuitively, the vote-based mechanism will tend to be optimal when a party’s supporters are evenly distributed across regions, and when the prize ß adopts intermediate values, which together lead to high levels of inter-broker competition. When brokers must compete with one another over valued prizes, parties can often minimize rent seeking without directly monitoring broker effort.

Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2022-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dem and nep-mic
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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