Chapter 4 argues that despite rising income, vulnerability often spurs citizens to help sustain relational clientelism.First, it examines Brazil’s substantial pro-poor income growth, fueled in large part by labor income, social pensions, and a conditional cash transfer program. Analyses show that campaign handouts become less attractive as income increases, as theory predicts.Nevertheless, many Brazilians continue to be vulnerable to adverse shocks, providing a motivation to fortify clientelist relationships as a risk-coping mechanism.State efforts to expand Brazil’s social safety net provide inadequate risk protection.Less than a tenth of Brazilians who lose their jobs receive unemployment benefits. Inadequacies in the public healthcare system often contribute to catastrophic out-of-pocket expenditures. And recurring droughts threaten many citizens’ livelihood.During such shocks, Chapter 4 demonstrates why local politicians are often able to assist clients in exchange for political support – there are considerable resources and discretion at the municipal level.Overall, vulnerability provides many citizens a powerful motivation to help sustain relational clientelism.

Chapter 3 distills the logic and mechanisms by which citizens help to sustain relational clientelism.Although these ongoing exchange relationships are relatively resilient to many challenges facing electoral clientelism, their survival is imperiled by the possibility that citizens or politicians may engage in opportunistic defection.Citizens may renege on their vote promises, and politicians may renege on their promises of material benefits.Voters often undertake purposive actions to mitigate this dual credibility problem, and thereby fortify relational clientelism. Vulnerability frequently motivates clients to do so, as clientelist relationships provide an important form of informal insurance when the state fails to provide an adequate social safety net.This theoretical chapter examines two citizen mechanisms—declared support and requesting benefits. Building on a signaling model, it examines how citizens declare support to transmit meaningful information about the credibility of their vote promises. In addition, it elaborates the logic by which citizens can screen against politicians who are unlikely to follow through on promises of benefits beyond election campaigns.

Chapter 7 argues that citizens play an important role in clientelism far beyond Brazil.In many countries, clientelism confronts serious threats, such as rising income, institutional reforms, heightened legal enforcement and partisan strategies. Yet clientelism endures, in part because many citizens are motivated to help sustain ongoing exchange relationships that mitigate their vulnerability. Evidence from Argentina and Mexico documents various challenges threatening clientelism, as well as substantial vulnerability facing many citizens. In both countries, a strong link is observed between clientelism and this book’s two key mechanisms:citizens who declare support publicly for candidates — and those who ask politicians and their representatives for benefits — are more likely to experience clientelism.Similar findings are observed for one or both mechanisms in Ghana, India, Lebanon, and Yemen, and cross-national data from Africa and Latin America reveal a robust association between requesting benefits and clientelism.Such evidence corroborates more thorough testing of mechanisms in Brazil, and suggests how citizens often help to sustain relational clientelism.

Chapter 6 examines requesting benefits, a key mechanism by which citizens help to sustain relational clientelism. Even in rural Northeast Brazil, an area not traditionally known for high levels of voter autonomy, the majority of citizens who receive handouts had asked politicians for help. Citizens’ demands are frequently motivated by vulnerability: most requests involve life necessities, such as water and medicine, and they spike during adverse shocks. Evidence is consistent with both relational clientelism and the logic of screening elaborated in Chapter 3. Analyses suggest that during both election and non-election years, requesters disproportionately receive help, with declared supporters as more likely recipients. Interviews provide insight about the screening role of requests in ongoing clientelist relationships, and regressions show that survey respondents often espouse negative perceptions of politicians who deny their requests, and refuse to vote for them. By eliciting information about politicians’ trustworthiness, requesting benefits enables citizens to mitigate an important threat to the survival of relational clientelism.