ChapterPDF Available

When Clients Become Patrons: Teachers, Mayors and the Transformation of Clientelism in Colombia

Authors:
In Diego Abente Brun and Larry Diamond, eds., Clientelism, Social
Policy, and the Quality of Democracy. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2014.
... An important component of this is Colombia's rich history of clientelism. Historically, clientelism was central to elections and reinforced the strength of landowners in rural areas (Eaton and Chambers-Ju 2014;Ocampo 2014). These legacies remain today. ...
... As an assistant to a mayor in Valle de Cauca explained (July 2016), mayors continue to provide additional jobs and contracts to their allies to maintain political support because it is the best way to keep political networks mobilized. However, Colombian citizens have also sought changes to the existing clientelist practices, leading to a context in which citizens expect patronage networks but do not want to be swayed by the resulting benefits (Eaton and Chambers-Ju 2014). ...
Article
In decentralized systems, citizens struggle to identify which level of government provides local goods. This problem is particularly salient in weakly institutionalized party environments, where politicians at different levels of government are less likely to benefit from partisan coattail effects. This article asks how citizens attribute credit for local public goods. I argue that citizens have a strong tendency to attribute credit to local politicians. As a result, citizens will respond differently to credit-claiming behavior by local and national politicians. Local politicians experience a ceiling effect, in which credit claiming has no effect on how citizens attribute credit. However, national politicians have no such ceiling and can claim credit to increase the likelihood that citizens will attribute credit to them. As a result, both political actors can receive credit for the same local goods. The article tests and supports these theoretical predictions using a vignette survey experiment in Colombia.
... Among the government team that negotiated the Havana Accord, decentralization suffered from a bad reputation, largely because of the view that decentralizing reforms in the 1980s and 1990s had enabled the FARC to bolster its legitimacy as a governing actor in the municipalities that it came to control after the introduction of direct elections (Gutiérrez Sanín, 2010;Duncan, 2015). Others came to believe that, although decentralization was adopted in the hopes that it would sever clientelistic exchanges between national legislators and captive voters, it merely enabled mayors to build their own clientelistic networks (Eaton & Chambers-Ju, 2014). Military representatives on the government team had their own reasons for skepticism about subnational governments, fearing that the FARC would continue to try to challenge the state from their subnational bases of support. ...
Chapter
This chapter examines the evolution of Spain and the United Kingdom (UK) as federal political systems. Neither Spain nor the UK qualifies as a full-fledged federation, but an identifiable process of federalization has taken root in both cases. Unpacking the experience of political decentralization, the chapter examines the efficacy of current arrangements vis-à-vis the politics of accommodation, with specific reference to elements of symbolic recognition, self-rule and shared rule, and identifies ongoing challenges to the development of federalism in Spain and the UK. In discussing the origins, evolution and challenges of the territorial models in both cases, the analysis highlights the evolving practice of territorial reform in these political systems, notwithstanding the absence of a conscious federal teleology. The analysis shows that federalism—as an enhanced model of territorial accommodation—has much to offer both Spain and the UK, but hitherto remains a marginalized option for constitutional reform.
Article
Full-text available
Objetivo/contexto: Este artículo tiene dos objetivos: el principal es mostrar que en las elecciones presidenciales de 2018 aumentó la votación de clase en comparación con las elecciones de 2006, 2010 y 2014; el segundo es desarrollar una posible explicación de este fenómeno. Nuestra hipótesis es que el aumento de votación de clase en las elecciones de 2018 se podría explicar, en parte, por el alto nivel de polarización ideológica entre los dos candidatos presidenciales, Iván Duque y Gustavo Petro, tanto en el eje derecha-izquierda como en el eje populista - no populista. Metodología: Utilizamos los datos de la Registraduría Nacional del Estado Civil y los mapas de estratificación socioeconómica para identificar los resultados electorales de los dos candidatos presidenciales principales con base en las diferentes clases sociales de las cinco principales ciudades colombianas: Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Barranquilla y Cartagena. Para medir la votación de clase desarrollamos el índice de diferencia de votación (IDV) que identifica la diferencia en el comportamiento electoral entre dos clases sociales. También comparamos la diferencia entre la votación esperada y observada por cada candidato presidencial en las clases alta, media y baja. Conclusiones: En las elecciones presidenciales de 2018 la votación de clase en los principales centros urbanos de Colombia aumentó de manera significativa en comparación con las elecciones presidenciales de 2006, 2010 y 2014. Nuestro análisis muestra que es probable que la votación de clase se active por la polarización ideológica entre los candidatos presidenciales, tanto en el eje populista - no populista como en el eje derecha-izquierda. Originalidad: Este es de los pocos trabajos que comparan el nivel de votación de clase entre diferentes elecciones presidenciales en Colombia y que explora la relación entre la polarización ideológica y la votación de clase en varias elecciones presidenciales colombianas.
Chapter
In this chapter, the authors suggest two ways in which clientelism impacts education, specifically secondary school improvements, an important growth-promoting mode of social investment in developing democracies. First, clientelism “crowds out” fiscal educational investment effort in favor of clientelistic expenditures to targeted voters, a more or less common form of political partisan linkage outside most advanced post-industrial democracies. Second, clientelism “degrades” educational results as it undercuts professional quality control of educational service delivery and diverts funds to rent-seeking educational service providers and recipients. The authors empirically test both arguments with statistical analyses on cross-national data of clientelistic politics and educational inputs and outcomes. The findings indeed suggest a negative impact of clientelism on secondary school investment, in terms of both fiscal effort as well as educational qualifications. The authors supplement the quantitative investigation with a small case study on educational investment in Mexico.
Chapter
In contrast to formally federal systems, in Colombia the absence of procedural safeguards for territorial units has facilitated a high degree of institutional instability as the country has experienced multiple overlapping processes of territorial design and redesign. In the 1980s and 1990s, reformers at the national level in Colombia embraced federal principles in the course of processes that were designed to build democracy, peace, and even the state itself. Subsequently, however, the displacement of these reformers from power at the national level led to the enactment of several de-federalizing processes over the past two decades as the pendulum has swung sharply back toward the center. Although the existence of procedural safeguards by no means guarantees that they will be used, in their absence Colombia has oscillated dramatically between reforms that empowered and then disempowered its territorial units due to contradictory processes of institutional (re)design that enjoyed little input from the representatives of these units themselves. In this way, Colombia illustrates the merits of the processual approach to the study of emerging federal systems that is adopted in this volume.KeywordsColombiaFederalismShared ruleDecentralizationRecentralization
Chapter
This chapter explores some of the main reforms promoted during the Duque administration (2018–present). Before the Covid-19 pandemic, the Congress approved a reform to the general system of royalties, a ceiling on property tax rates (a subnational tax, see Chap. 4), and the legal regime for the organisation of regional authorities (associations of departments). The study of this administration shows a decrease of recentralising reforms when there is no economic boom but rather an economic crisis (in this case, because of the measures to face the coronavirus) in a predominantly recentralised institutional context (PRI) (inherited by Duque because of the recentralising reforms of 2001, 2007, and 2011). For instance, instead of transferring more prerogatives from subnational to national instances, the royalties reform of 2019 sought to increase the royalties allocated to the producing areas, as well as to simplify the bureaucratic procedures to manage these resources (created with the reform of 2011, see Chap. 8).
Chapter
The aim of this book is to explain why and how after a comprehensive set of decentralising processes (political, fiscal and administrative), Colombia experienced significant recentralising policies and reforms (particularly in 2001, 2007, and 2011). These recentralising changes emerged not only against what was expected by leading works on decentralisation in Latin America (that did not predict this type of “back pedalling”), but in a way that the existing hypotheses on recentralisation cannot fully account for. The research design of the book traces and compares reform efforts across almost three decades. The period under study begins in 1994 and ends in 2020 (five different presidencies). This makes for a very detailed analysis and provides the adequate setting for a path-dependent approach. One of the highlights of the book are about a hundred interviews with the key decision makers. The interactive and cross-temporal framework developed to explain Colombia’s recentralisation could provide a template for the study of administrative recentralisation reforms across Latin American countries. Still, it does not aim to propose a general theory of recentralisation.
Chapter
This chapter mainly seeks to provide a baseline of the levels of subnational autonomy in Colombia that resulted from the decentralising reforms, against which the following empirical chapters measure the recentralising reforms. The chapter begins with a country profile and a brief history of Colombia’s subnational issues. The following sections describe the sequence (i.e. fiscal, then political, and finally administrative prerogatives) and content of the decentralisation reforms adopted in this country in the 1980s and 1990s. This analysis challenges certain parts of influential accounts of the emergence of Colombia’s decentralisation. The last section concludes by summarising the main elements of the predominantly decentralised institutional context (PDI) that emerged from the Constitution of 1991.
Chapter
There have been different types of arguments in the empirical literature on the factors that have shaped recentralisation around the world. Depending on their main independent variable they may be classified into three categories: economic, political and administrative. Generally, these explanations are particularly focused on the impact of only one type of factor instead of on the role of the interactions between them, and, interestingly enough, most of them assume temporal causal homogeneity. Specifically, they do not take into account the changes in the institutional context generated by the early recentralising reforms (sometimes because the period under study is too short). And they are excessively focused on the national governments, while neglecting the explanation of the role of legislators and subnational authorities.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.