Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Understanding the Decline of Clientelism in Brazil

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In older democracies, political parties often traded individualized rewards--food, cash, clothing--for voters' support. Such strategies, while rare in these countries today, are still deployed in developing countries such as India, Argentina, and the Philippines. In Brazil, vote buying was once widespread but now is in decline. What explains this shift? Answering this question is essential to understanding why some democratic governments seek to respond to the needs of their citizens. This dissertation explores the process by which vote buying is replaced by programmatic politics, where politicians seek to attract voters' support with policy proposals. In the NSF-funded component of the project, the researcher will conduct two large sample surveys in Brazil in order to test original hypotheses about why voters shift their support to programmatic politicians. A nationally representative survey will identify the type of people who sell their vote. Another survey will focus on the state of Bahia, which has undergone dramatic political changes over the past decade. This targeted survey will allow the researcher to test hypotheses about local characteristics that support a shift to programmatic politics. Data from this project will also be used to conduct cross-national comparisons with other countries where vote buying has been prevalent. The literature on vote buying, which tends to focus on improving understanding of how party machines work, does not offer a good explanation for why this strategy gives way to programmatic appeals. One long-running debate, for example, pits scholars who believe that party machines target apolitical "swing voters" against others who think that politicians focus on cultivating relationships with "core voters." Why politicians might forsake vote buying altogether--or lose to those who do--is left unasked. Some older research did explore why vote buying declines, but explanations were generally tied to broader social shifts and lacked rigorous empirical testing. Such research does not fully account for the regional disparities in how politics is practiced in Brazil, nor does it provide sufficient insight into why particular political machines break down. This project takes prior research and current debates as a point of departure. While most contemporary research on vote buying assumes that current political systems are immalleable, this project breaks new ground by providing data that will allow for rigorous quantitative analysis of the factors that lead voters to sell their vote. By explaining regional variation in the prevalence of vote buying in Brazil, this research will provide insight into what causes vote buying to decline--both in some regions of contemporary Brazil and in other contexts. This study will also provide important but previously unavailable data to other researchers. In addition to advancing the literature on vote buying and democratic consolidation and generating new data on topics that have received little scrutiny, this research will have important implications beyond academia. Understanding why some political systems adopt programmatic politics while others do not is an important step towards understanding--and overcoming--the impediments to constructing a democracy that truly represents its citizens.