Clientelism and Voter Mobilisation: The Impact of Positive and Negative Inducements

In elections around the world, candidates seek to mobilize voters using a combination of positive and negative clientelist inducements. The former includes offers of gifts, money, and privileged access to policy benefits; the latter includes threats to cut off access to long-term benefits, social grants, or to worsen ongoing terms of exchange between brokers and voters. In this paper, we examine variation in the ways voters evaluate different types of clientelist strategies. Explaining variation in punishment thresholds is an important component for understanding the costs of – but also leeway enjoyed by – politicians using different forms of clientelism. To this end, we rely on a vignette experiment embedded in a nation-wide survey (n=1500) conducted in 2017 in South Africa – a country that has received only scant attention in the clientelism literature. The results suggest that, on average, voters punish candidates using both positive and negative clientelist inducements, but that candidates using threats are punished to a much larger extent than candidates using positive inducements. However, voters do not respond to the use of clientelist inducements – positive or negative – by retreating from political participation. Overall, while voters in South Africa are prone to punish negative inducements in particular, their inclination to participate in elections seems to be unaffected by clientelism.