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Perverse Accountability: A Formal Model of Machine Politics with Evidence from Argentina

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2005

SUSAN C. STOKES
SUSAN C. STOKES
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Abstract

Political machines (or clientelist parties) mobilize electoral support by trading particularistic benefits to voters in exchange for their votes. But if the secret ballot hides voters' actions from the machine, voters are able to renege, accepting benefits and then voting as they choose. To explain how machine politics works, I observe that machines use their deep insertion into voters' social networks to try to circumvent the secret ballot and infer individuals' votes. When parties influence how people vote by threatening to punish them for voting for another party, I call this accountability. I analyze the strategic interaction between machines and voters as an iterated prisoners' dilemma game with one-sided uncertainty. The game generates hypotheses about the impact of the machine's capacity to monitor voters, and of voters' incomes and ideological stances, on the effectiveness of machine politics. I test these hypotheses with data from Argentina.

Type
ARTICLES
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 99 , Issue 3 , August 2005 , pp. 315 - 325
Copyright
© 2005 by the American Political Science Association

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