We organize existing studies under two theories: theories of democratic accountability and of government responsiveness. We inventory more than $150$ studies of distributive politics in more than three dozen countries other than the United States. Preliminary tests of this hypothesis against the swing voter hypothesis suggest it deserves further examination.
In view of these results, this paper develops an alternative "political stability" hypothesis that predicts the president will distribute jobs primarily to potentially destabilizing areas where political activity and opposition to the government are relatively high. Although the data provide greater support for the "swing voter" hypothesis, certain features of the pattern of redistribution cannot be explained by this theory either.
Using data on the distribution of government jobs after Mali's founding multiparty election in 1992, this paper shows that the "core supporter" hypothesis is clearly invalid in the Malian case. The innovation of this paper is testing these competing theories in a situation that controls for the potential endogeneity between vote share and redistribution. In contrast, the theoretical literature on redistribution suggests that rational office-seeking politicians often have incentives to redistribute goods to swing voters. The widespread assumption in African studies is that patronage relations between politicians and their core supporters dominate politics on the continent.
0 kommentar(er)
