Kalender-Details

Vortragende Person/Vortragende Personen:
Herbert Kitschelt

Diese Veranstaltung ist Teil der Veranstaltungsreihe „In_equality Colloquium“.

The bulk of the academic literature on clientelism has asserted that the prevalence of clientelistic transactional mechanisms between politicians and citizens in competitive electoral democracies fosters, entrenches, or at least perpetuates particularly stark economic inequality of income and wealth. The theoretical underpinnings of this claim, however, have been weak and are contestable. Moreover, because of the absence of appropriate empirical measures, not a single study so far has adequately explored this claim in a broad cross-national, let alone longitudinal comparative perspective.

The paper lays out rival theories linking democratic accountability mechanisms to policy strategies that are hypothesized to promote or to contain economic inequality. Drawing on a novel global dataset—DALP II (Democratic Accountability and Linkage Project)—the paper provides a first rough test of the correlations between modes of democratic accountability and inequality outcomes. This provisional paper also lays out ideas for a research strategy to deepen the analysis:

• lay out mechanisms that connect linkage mechanisms to outcomes through distinctive policies or their absence (especially state capacity building, social policies and direct taxation);gain a modicum of causal leverage probing into the relationship between clientelism and income inequality through a diff-in-diff analysis, drawing on both DALP I (2008-9) as well as DALP II (2022-4) data for countries covered in both surveys.
• As of writing this abstract, the dataset is still incomplete and none of the empirical analysis has been performed. Theoretical priors of the colloquium presenter are, however, that clientelism does not systematically worsen inequality—or only contingently so in middle income developing countries and under conditions of comparatively high state capacity. If anything, in some regards clientelism may improve income distribution as a “second best” strategy to enable citizens to hedge risks in capitalist labor markets, and particularly under conditions of extremely weak state capacity.

Herbert Kitschelt is Professor of Political Science at Duke University, North Carolina. He specializes in comparative political parties and elections in established and new democracies, comparative public policy and political economy, as well as 20^th century social theory. Among his numerous publications is the book The Radical Right in Western Europe (with Anthony J. McGann), which received the 1996 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award from the American Political Science Association. His latest projects include a global comparison of citizen-politician linkage mechanisms in democracies, and a renewed effort to map and account for the transformation of political party system in postindustrial democracies.

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