Can Institutions Cure Clientelism?

University Of Virginia Main Campus, Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Abstract

The ballot is the fundamental instrument of democracy in the modern world. Perhaps more than any other device utilized in contemporary elections, it has come to embody the process by which voter preferences structure the makeup of the ruling elite. Yet most citizens of democratic polities take for granted the series of institutional innovations in the dissemination and composition of the ballot that made it possible for this instrument to serve today as a symbol of the free and authentic convictions of voters. Among such innovations, it was a specific packet of reforms in ballot preparation and distribution, the so-called Australian ballot reforms, which were responsible for one of the most crucial turning points in the history of democracy - the transition from de jure to de facto secrecy in vote choice. This project will provide a rigorous examination of how the use of the Australian ballot (AB)- a uniform ballot paper permitting the selection of any registered candidate and which is printed and distributed by electoral authorities (as opposed to candidates or parties)- affected the fundamental structure of party politics in Brazil after its introduction in the early 1960s. Engaging the claims of a literature on institutions and clientelism in developing democracies, the impact of the AB on four key outcomes will be evaluated: 1) the electoral strength of incumbent state party machines; 2) the degree of electoral control enjoyed by local vote brokers; 3) the electoral strength of right parties; and 4) the scope of participation in the electoral process. In order to get leverage on the impact of the AB, this project will examine municipal-level vote returns for federal deputy and senate contests in Brazil during the 1958-1966 period. The analysis will exploit the fact that the peculiar manner in which the AB was rolled out by the country's civilian and military rulers created a natural experiment of history of exceptionally rare purity. During this period, legislative elections - which put seats for both the Chamber of Deputies and Senate simultaneously up for grabs - were held at three different times: 1958, 1962, and 1966. In 1958, the AB was in effect throughout all of Brazil for senatorial contests, whereas candidate printed ballots were utilized throughout all of Brazil for the deputy contests. In 1962, the AB remained in effect for all of Brazil for the senatorial contests but was also extended to deputy contests in the state of São Paulo, the city of Rio de Janeiro, and state capitals. In 1966, basically the same situation obtained, save for the fact that the AB for deputy contests was extended further to all municipalities with more than one hundred thousand inhabitants. Taking maximal advantage of the geographically and institutionally targeted and temporally staggered nature of ballot reform in Brazil, this project will employ several variants of the difference-in-difference technique to estimate the causal impact of the AB on the outcomes of interest. Empirically evaluating the impact of the AB on the structure of political representation has been one of the great challenges of institutionally oriented social science. It is a task which has courted the efforts of political scientists, economists, and historians, and one which has spawned numerous investigations into the historical experiences of polities around the world. Given the peculiarities of the AB's adoption in Brazil, it is reasonable to posit that the current project has the potential to produce the cleanest evaluation of the impact of this institution in the entire social science corpus on the subject. As a consequence, the findings of this project are likely to contribute to ongoing policy debates about the attractiveness of adopting the AB within polities that have not yet done so. More broadly, the research design employed by this project may in the future serve as a model of how to simultaneously exploit spatial, temporal, and institutional variation in the adoption of formal rules in order to estimate the impact of aspects of democratic institutional design. The project will also have a lasting impact in terms of training graduate students and educating undergraduates. The substantial administrative and coding duties required of each group of students will provide a hands on tutorial on the organization and execution of large scale quantitative research projects in the social sciences.