Clientelism and Local Politics: Interactions Between Municipal Councilors and Voters in the State of Minas Gerais

This article addresses the subject of clientelism with reference to an unprecedented set of data resulting from a survey of 422 municipal councilors in 44 Brazilian municipalities. Our aim was to verify whether a propensity for clientelist behavior was uniformly distributed among the councilors surveyed and, in the event that it was not, to identify factors that could explain any variations. Our analysis revealed that clientelism – understood as the degree of exposure on the part of councilors to voter demands for individual benefits, and the councilors' willingness to attend to such demands by means of informal strategies – varies among councilors. Through a multivariate analysis of data, we concluded that these variations are related, as we expected, to such characteristics of the municipalities as population, poverty levels and political competition, and to such individual attributes of councilors as ideology and position in relation to the executive branch. We also conclude that there is an interaction between poverty and competition: competition seems to be more relevant than poverty to explain the observed variations, and its effect is intensified; the explanatory power of poverty is higher in the context of low political competition.

本文围绕庇护主义（clientelism）这一主题展开探讨，所依托的是针对巴西44个市镇的422名市议员开展调查所形成的前所未有的数据集。本研究旨在验证受访市议员的庇护主义行为倾向是否呈均匀分布；若并非如此，则识别可解释此类差异的影响因素。分析结果显示，市议员群体的庇护主义水平存在个体差异——本研究将庇护主义界定为市议员接触选民个人福利诉求的程度，以及市议员通过非正式策略回应此类诉求的意愿。通过对数据集开展多元分析，本研究证实，正如预期那般，此类差异与市镇的人口规模、贫困水平、政治竞争度等市镇特征，以及市议员的意识形态、与行政部门的关系等个体属性均存在关联。本研究同时发现，贫困水平与政治竞争度之间存在交互效应：相较于贫困水平，政治竞争度对观测到的差异更具解释力，且其影响效应会被强化；而在政治竞争度较低的情境中，贫困水平的解释力则更强。