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Weapons of Clients: Why Do Voters Support Bad Patrons? Ethnographic Evidence from Rural Brazil

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2022

Mariana Borges Martins da Silva Open the ORCID record for Mariana Borges Martins da Silva [Opens in a new window]
Mariana Borges Martins da Silva*
Affiliation:
Mariana Borges Martins da Silva is a postdoctoral prize research fellow in politics at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK. mariana.borges@nuffield.ox.ac.uk.
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Abstract

Current approaches to voting behavior in clientelist contexts either predict that clients leave their preferences aside for fear of having their benefits cut off or voluntarily support politicians they perceive to be reliable patrons. These two approaches cannot account for clients’ vote choices in the Sertão of Bahia, Brazil, where voters were free to choose among competing candidates but supported patrons they knew were unreliable. This article argues that clients voluntarily voted for bad patrons as a strategy to gain symbolic power in their negotiations with politicians. By explaining clients’ paradoxical choices in the Sertão, this article reveals how clientelism can persist without monitoring mechanisms or positive attitudes toward patrons. In addition, this study shows the importance of incorporating voters’ perspectives and their everyday survival strategies to better account for clients’ political behavior.

Keywords

Clientelismvote buyingclientspolitical behaviorethnographyrural Brazil
Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Politics and Society , Volume 65 , Issue 1 , February 2023 , pp. 22 - 46
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the University of Miami

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