Hostname: page-component-55f67697df-sqlfs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-05-14T17:00:56.139Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Perverse Accountability: A Formal Model of Machine Politics with Evidence from Argentina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2005

SUSAN C. STOKES
SUSAN C. STOKES
Affiliation:
Yale University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Political machines (or clientelist parties) mobilize electoral support by trading particularistic benefits to voters in exchange for their votes. But if the secret ballot hides voters' actions from the machine, voters are able to renege, accepting benefits and then voting as they choose. To explain how machine politics works, I observe that machines use their deep insertion into voters' social networks to try to circumvent the secret ballot and infer individuals' votes. When parties influence how people vote by threatening to punish them for voting for another party, I call this accountability. I analyze the strategic interaction between machines and voters as an iterated prisoners' dilemma game with one-sided uncertainty. The game generates hypotheses about the impact of the machine's capacity to monitor voters, and of voters' incomes and ideological stances, on the effectiveness of machine politics. I test these hypotheses with data from Argentina.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 99 , Issue 3 , August 2005 , pp. 315 - 325
Copyright
© 2005 by the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Ansolabehere Stephen, and James M. Snyder, Jr. 2002. Party Control of State Government and the Distribution of Public Expenditures. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Typescript.Google Scholar
Auyero Javier. 2000. Poor People's Politics: Peronist Survival Networks and the Legacy of Evita. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Calvo Ernesto, and Maria Victoria Murillo. 2004. “Who Delivers? Partisan Clients in the Argentine Electoral Market.” American Journal of Political Science (October): 742– 57.Google Scholar
Chandra Kanchan. 2004. Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Chubb Judith. 1982. Patronage, Power, and Poverty in Southern Italy. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Cox Gary W., and Matthew D. McCubbins. 1986. “Electoral Politics as a Redistributive Game.” Journal of Politics 48 (May): 370– 89.Google Scholar
Diaz-Cayeros Alberto, Beatriz Magaloni, and Barry Weingast. 2001. Democratization and the Economy in Mexico: Equilibrium (PRI) Hegemony and its Demise. Stanford University. Typescript.
Dixit Avinash, and John Londregan. 1996. “The Determinants of Success of Special Interests in Redistributive Politics.” Journal of Politics 58 (November): 1132– 55.Google Scholar
Fox Jonathan. 1994. “The Difficult Transition from Clientelism to Citizenship: Lessons from Mexico.” World Politics 46 (January): 151– 84.Google Scholar
Karlan Pamela. 1994. “Not by Virtue but by Money Won? Vote Trafficking and the Voting Rights Systems.” Virginia Law Review 80 (October): 1455– 75.Google Scholar
Keyssar Alexander. 2000. The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States. New York: Basic Books.
King Gary, Michael Tomz, and Jason Wittenberg. 2000. “Making the Most of Statistical Analysis: Improving Interpretation and Presentation.” American Journal of Political Science 94: 347– 61.Google Scholar
Kitschelt Herbert, Zdenka Mansfeldova, Radoslaw Markowski, and Gábor Tóka. 1999. Post-Communist Party Systems: Competition, Representation, and Inter-Party Cooperation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kochin Michael S., and Levis A. Kochin. 1998. “When Is Vote Buying Wrong?” Public Choice 97: 645– 62.Google Scholar
Levitsky Steven. 2003. Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective. New York: Cambridge University Press.
McCaffery Peter. 1993. When Bosses Ruled Philadelphia: The Emergence of the Republican Machine, 1867–1933. University Park, PA: Penn State Press.
Medina Luis Fernando, and Susan C. Stokes. 2003. Clientelism as Political Monopoly. Chicago Center on Democracy Working Paper #25.
O'Donnell Guillermo. 1996. Another Institutionalization: Latin America and Elsewhere. Kellogg Institute Working Paper #222. Notre Dame, IN: Kellogg Institute for International Studies.
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. 2003. Russian Federation State Duma Elections, 7 December 2003: Preliminary Findings of the OSCE International Election Observation Mission. Vienna, Austria: OSCE.
Piattoni Simona, ed. 2001. Clientelism, Interests, and Democratic Representation: The European Experience in Historical Perspective. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Reynolds John. 1988. Testing Democracy: Electoral Behavior and Progressive Reform in New Jersey, 1880–1920. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Reynolds John. 1980. “‘The Silent Dollar’: Vote Buying in New Jersey.” New Jersey History 98: 191– 211.Google Scholar
Scott James C. 1969. “Corruption, Machine Politics, and Political Change.” American Political Science Review 63 (December): 1142– 58.Google Scholar
Stigler George J. 1975. The Citizen and the State: Essays on Regulation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stokes Susan C. 1995. Cultures in Conflict: Social Movements and the State in Peru. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Stokes Susan C. 2004. Is Vote Buying Undemocratic? Paper presented annual meetings of the American Political Science Association, Chicago.
Tam Waikeung. 2003. Clientelist Politics in Singapore: Selective Provision of Housing Services as an Electoral Mobilization Strategy. University of Chicago. Typescript.
Tomz Michael, Jason Wittenberg, and Gary King. 2003. Clarify: Software for Interpreting and Presenting Statistical Results. Version 2.1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, January 5. Http://gking.harvard.edu.
Wilson James Q., and Edward Banfield. 1963. City Politics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Submit a response

Comments

No Comments have been published for this article.