Patronage at Work

Virginia Oliveros is Associate Professor of Political Science at Tulane University. She co-edited (with Noam Lupu and Luis Schiumerini) Campaigns and Voters in Developing Democracies (2019). Her research has appeared in American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, and Comparative Politics.

• 1. Introduction; 2. A Theory of Self-Enforcing Patronage; 3 Getting the Job; 4. Patronage Contracts and Political Services: Evidence from List Experiments; 5. Patronage, Favors, and the Personalization of Public Administration; 6. Self- Enforcing Patronage Contracts; 7. Beyond the Argentine Case; 8. Conclusions and Broader Implications.

'Although clientelism and vote buying have been widely studied in Latin America, the central role of public sector employees in the discretionary, patronage-based distribution of public services for partisan gain has never received the attention it deserves. Virginia Oliveros corrects that oversight in this pathbreaking book on political patronage in Argentina, and she employs rigorous empirical methods to explain why it is in the self-interest of party brokers and clients to uphold their end of the bargain. This book sheds new light on the alignment of interests that not only make patronage work, but also help it to endure – and it thoroughly dissects the implications of partisan patronage for the quality of democratic representation and governance.' Kenneth Roberts, Richard J. Schwartz Professor of Government, Cornell University