Varieties of clientelism across political parties: new measures of patron–client relationships

Abstract Recent research on clientelism has focused on the varieties of clientelism. They suggest that clientelistic exchanges differ in terms of the expected length of iterations, whereby politicians deliver benefits to voters in exchange for political support. Using newly collected V-Party data (1,844 political parties from 165 countries, 1970–2019), we identify two prominent types of clientelism that recent studies have suggested: relational clientelism and single-shot clientelism. By demonstrating that our measures of clientelism outperform existing cross-national indices, we suggest that it is important to unpack clientelistic linkages at the party level to grasp the fine-grained differences in clientelism across parties within states. We then apply our measures to the analysis of the relationship between economic development and clientelism, one of the major topics in the clientelism study. Our analysis finds that relational clientelism persists even in relatively developed countries, whereas the effect of economic development on single-shot clientelism has a curvilinear relationship. Our applications of the new measures of clientelism also show that the gap in clientelistic practices between ruling and opposition parties varies depending on the types of clientelism, tenure lengths of incumbents, and the degree of political centralization.