COLLABORATIVE RESEARCH: Patronage, Democracy, and the Public Sector: Estimating the Size and Structure of Patronage Networks

在过去二十年中，拉丁美洲政党越来越依赖公共资源的分配来维持大量选民的支持。在政党分配的众多福利中，没有什么比公共就业更重要了，公共就业通常在党的官员的直接监督下，保证了长期稳定和相对较高的收入。以就业换取政治支持被称为政治庇护，对其进行研究是本研究的主要目的。了解政治庇护的规模和结构对新兴民主国家来说是一项至关重要的努力，在这些国家，越来越多的公民依靠民选官员提供的福利来维持物质生存。任免开支不公平地使现任政党受益，它们滥用对公共资源的优先准入来阻止进一步的竞争，并使其成员继续执政。然而，没有研究衡量过这些赞助交换的程度或其对公共部门总体规模的影响。研究人员测量了拉丁美洲赞助网络的规模和结构，并首次系统地评估了赞助网络对公共部门的影响。为了测量赞助的规模和结构，研究人员利用网络分析的最新发展，使用“你知道多少个X ?”这种形式的间接调查问题来估计难以计数的人口的规模。估计分两步进行：首先，他们测量被调查者个人网络的规模，将有关已知群体规模的信息与每个被调查者提供的答案相结合。一旦研究人员知道了网络中每个被调查者的规模和位置，他们就可以估计出参与惠顾交换的不同亚群体的规模。为了估计赞助网络的规模，研究人员收集了两个最近民主化的国家：阿根廷和智利的调查数据。由于这些国家的政党制度和公共部门非常不同，研究人员可以衡量赞助网络的规模，并解释是什么决定了他们的相对成功。需要检验的最重要的假设之一是公共就业类型——永久、临时和合同雇佣——与任免招聘的选择之间的关系。一个大的国家样本也使研究人员能够衡量其他变量的影响，如城市化水平、民选官员监督的可能性，以及政治竞争加剧的影响。

In the last twenty years, Latin American political parties have become increasingly dependent on the distribution of public resources to maintain the support of large numbers of voters. Among the many goods distributed by political parties none is more important than public employment, guaranteeing a secure and relatively well-paid income over long periods of time, often under the direct supervision of party officials. The exchange of employment for political support is known as political patronage and its study is the main objective of this research.Understanding the size and structure of patronage is a crucial endeavor for newly democratized countries, where an increasing numbers of citizens depend on the benefits provided by elected officials for their material survival. Patronage spending unfairly benefits incumbent parties, which abuse their preferential access to public resources to deter further competition and perpetuate their members in office. No research, however, has measured the extent of these patronage exchanges or its effect on the overall size of the public sector. The researchers measure the size and structure of patronage in Latin America, and provide the first systematic assessment of the effect of patronage networks on the public sector. To measure the size and structure of patronage, the researchers take advantage of recent developments in network analysis that use indirect survey questions of the form "how many X's do you know?" to estimate the size of hard-to-count populations. Estimation is carried in two steps: first, they measure the size of the respondent's personal network combining information about well known group sizes to the answers provided by each respondent. Once the researchers know the size and location of each respondent within the network, they can estimate the size of the different subpopulations involved in the patronage exchange. To estimate the size of patronage networks, the researchers gather survey data from two recently democratized countries: Argentina and Chile. With very different party systems and public sectors, these countries allow researchers to measure the size of patronage networks and explain what determines their relative success. Among the most significant hypothesis to be tested are the relationship between the type of public employment - permanent, temporary, and by-contract - and the choice of patronage recruitment. A large national sample also allow the researchers to measure the effect of other variables such as the level of urbanization, the likelihood of monitoring by elected officials, and the effect of heightened political competition.