Is vulnerability a determinant of clientelism?

Responsible researcher: Eduarda Miller de Figueiredo

Article title: VULNERABILITY AND CLIENTELISM

Article authors: Gustavo J. Bobonis; Paul Gertler; Marco Gonzalez-Navarro; Simeon Nichter;

Location of intervention : Semi-arid region – Northeast of Brazil.

Sample size : 1,308 families – 615 families for the treatment group and 693 families for the control group.

Sector : Economic Policy and Governance

Type of intervention : Construction of cisterns to collect rainwater or store water from tanker trucks.

Variable of main interest : Requests for goods from politicians and vulnerability indices.

Evaluation method : Experimental Evaluation (RCT)

Assessment Context

Clientelism is the name given to the distribution of goods or services in exchange for political support, being a very important reason why many politicians are elected (KICKEN 2011; STOKES ET AL, 2013). The literature also argues that clientelism accentuates governmental allocative inefficiencies, in addition to harming the functioning of democratic institutions and leading to a low supply of public goods. Previous studies show evidence that people with low socioeconomic status are more likely to participate in clientelism. 

The northeast region of Brazil is known for being a semi-arid zone that contains more than 28 million inhabitants, who are disproportionately poor and from rural areas. Furthermore, it is a region characteristic for its recurrent droughts, where its average rainfall for the year 2012 was just 57.2 cm compared to 153.1 cm for the rest of the country. Such droughts are recognized in previous studies as a key source of the region being exposed to vulnerability.

The study states that mayors and councilors in the rural northeast tend to favor citizens with whom they maintain ongoing clientelistic relationships, where material benefits will be exchanged for political support. In this way, the authors propose to carry out a randomized experiment to test the hypothesis that reducing the vulnerability of families reduces the request for private goods from politicians.

Intervention Details

The intervention was the construction of cisterns in the homes of randomly chosen families present in the northeast region, aiming to reduce their vulnerable situation. Thus, the experiment was applied to rural residences that did not have drinking water or a cistern, had physical space to build a cistern and roofs made of metal sheets or tiles to facilitate rain collection.

The cisterns are connected by pipes and gutters to the roof of the house, providing rain collection. They can store up to 16,000 liters of water, therefore, in addition to being a technology for collecting water, they also serve to store water supplied by tanker trucks. Thus, the cisterns will reduce the vulnerability of families.

Methodology Details

To create the control and treatment groups, 40 municipalities were first randomly selected in the nine states of the semi-arid region, where each city had an average of 49 thousand citizens. Proportional weights were used for the number of residences without access to running water and cisterns, according to the Single Registry. Afterwards, also randomly, groups of neighboring rural families were selected, where up to six families were interviewed.

Three phases of face-to-face research were carried out in these selected families. The first phase took place in the last quarter of 2011, to collect data on pre-intervention household and individual characteristics. Immediately after the municipal elections in October 2012, the second phase was carried out, where new questions were asked and those from the first phase were repeated, making it possible to capture a possible effect of the treatment. Finally, the last data collection took place in the last quarter of 2013, aiming to capture effects in non-electoral periods.

From this sample, the authors find that 21.3% of respondents requested private goods for a mayoral or councilor candidate during the 2012 election year and, in a non-election year, 8.6% of respondents made these requests. Of these, 7% of respondents had their requests answered by candidates who were in office. An important fact is that requests are motivated by vital needs, where a quarter of them involved water. 

Data from the 2012 municipal election were extracted from the Superior Electoral Court of Brazil (TSE), which publishes aggregated data from electronic voting machines, as well as their geographic locations.

As a marker of clientelism, it was observed whether the interviewee spoke at least monthly with a local politician before the 2012 electoral campaign, as the hallmark of continuous exchange relationships. In addition, they used a marker for when the interviewee spoke with the local politician monthly before the election campaign and publicly declared his support for the candidate. Such measures, as can be seen in the graph above, are balanced between the treatment and control groups, demonstrating that it will be possible to observe whether there is a relationship between clientelism and vulnerability.

Thus, a sample of 1,308 families was constructed, of which 615 families were randomly selected for the treatment group and 693 for the control group. The authors observed the effects of intention to treat, that is, their analyzes compare the treatment group - which received the cistern intervention - with the control group.

Results

For treated families, an improvement in depressive symptoms, food security index and self-reported health status was found. Furthermore, the general index that standardizes these last three reported components demonstrates that there is a substantial reduction in vulnerability. Therefore, the results show that the cistern program reduced the vulnerability of research participants.

The research also demonstrated that the intervention ended up reducing the likelihood of citizens making requests for private goods to politicians by 3 percentage points. And, when observed for those citizens who were in a clientelistic relationship, there is a reduction of 10.9 percentage points in requests.

Likewise, it was found that reducing vulnerability through the cistern program harms the performance of incumbent mayors who are running for re-election, significantly reducing the votes received. Furthermore, it was found that these reductions occurred both during the electoral period (2012) and in the post-electoral period (2013), suggesting that the effect is persistent and long-term in relations between citizens and politicians.

Therefore, after presenting these results, the authors were left to conclude that the intervention of the cisterns provided to the treatment group reduced the number of requests for services or private goods to local politicians from citizens. This occurred because the program reduced the vulnerability of the population in the semi-arid northeast of Brazil.

Public Policy Lessons

In view of what has been exposed here, it is clear that vulnerability is a determinant of clientelism. Where, by improving citizens' livelihoods there will be a reduction in participation in exchanges of benefits for political support.

As clientelism accentuates government allocative inefficiencies, as argued at the beginning, its mitigation may contribute to a reduction in these allocative inefficiencies on the part of the government, in addition to improving the functioning of democratic institutions.

Reference

Bobonis, Gustavo J., Paul Gertler, Marco Gonzalez-Navarro, and Simeon Nichter. “Vulnerability and Clientelism.” NBER Working Paper No. 23589, July 2017.