Clientelism has been a major issue in Brazilian politics since the foundation of the Republic in 1889. Victor Nunes Leal’s Coronelismo, Enxada e Voto, first published in 1948, is probably the most well known and influential book on this topic. Delineating electoral practices that occurred in the first republic (1889-1930), Leal depicts a Brazil where there is hardly any semblance of a competitive democratic regime: despite the formal existence of a right to vote, electoral politics are completely manipulated and distorted by widespread fraud, vote-purchasing, and elite dominance over local politics. Fast-forwarding to the 21st century, what remains of those practices and how have they adapted to transformations that could have eliminated them?
Probably the most extensive and well-documented book written about the subject in the past several years, Simeon Nichter’s Votes for Survival: Relational Clientelism in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2019) is an extensively documented portrait of rural clientelism in contemporary Brazil.
Some of the questions Nichter poses include the following:
- How does electoral clientelism survive in a context where voter suppression strategies are weaker than they used to be given that voting is compulsory and state and municipal authorities cannot easily disenfranchise minorities or manipulate their votes?
- How could clientelism be “enforced” by corrupt politicians if ballot secrecy is strictly preserved by electoral safeguards such as universal electronic voting?
- Does engagement in clientelist practices even make sense in a system of proportional representation in which each vote counts equally and tilting a few thousand votes in a specific state might not be as consequential for the electoral results as it is in other countries, such as the United States?
- How does clientelism survive, especially given that economic conditions have greatly improved, at least by comparison to Brazil’s First Republic (1891-1930), where coronéis infamously dominated local politics through clientelist practices?
Nichter provides important evidence and arguments showing the remarkable resilience of clientelism, despite momentous political reforms and socioeconomic transformations over the past several decades. His book is constructed from extensive qualitative data collected over 18 months of field research in municipalities with fewer than 100,000 citizens in the states of Bahia (in 2008-2009) and in Pernambuco (in 2012). Nichter conducted formal interviews both with elites (mayors and city councils) and citizens. His research tests the resilience of clientelism in rural Brazil with quantitative randomized data collected from 1,210 municipalities from the Government’s poverty database (Cadastro Unico).
His first major finding is a reassessment of the role played by citizens in contemporary practices of clientelism. Clientelism is often seen as a corrupt practice initiated and maintained by politicians. But a very weak safety net means that citizens are often extremely vulnerable to unemployment, illness, droughts and economic shocks, and for these reasons they often demand personalized privileges from their local officials. Additionally, citizens play a significant role in the continuity of clientelism by providing proof of their political loyalty to their local representatives. By exhibiting political paraphernalia on their bodies, in their homes, and in public demonstrations, citizens provide candidates with credible evidence of their support, even though they cannot prove exactly how they voted. Nichter does not reject the role played by elites in political clientelism, but affirms that citizens’ roles are not as passive as the literature assumes; rather, they are instrumental both in soliciting benefits and demonstrating prolonged political support.
Nichter’s second major contribution is to demonstrate that clientelism cannot be properly understood if we look only to elections and overlook exchanges that extend beyond electoral periods. Clientelism, he argues, is not only an exchange between cash and votes during a limited period of time surrounding elections. This is Nichter’s definition of “relational clientelism”: contemporary clientelism in rural north-eastern Brazil is realized through a continuous exchange of votes for access to public benefits before and after the electoral period. Relational clientelism stands in contrast to electoral clientelism, which is the transactional exchange of votes for money. The implication of this argument is that the resilience of clientelism is essentially associated with failures of governance: state institutions fail to provide a safety net for the most vulnerable, forcing them to rely on clientelist practices for access to jobs in the municipal sector, economic relief or access to scarce basic goods, such as potable water in north-eastern arid Brazil.
Nichter’s work is of paramount importance for understanding the deleterious implications of poverty, income inequality and a deficient safety net for our political institutions. Institutions cannot be truly democratic or competitive if we do not address the deep-rooted economic inequality that has shaped our society for centuries.
