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Published in:
Introduction. The Paradox of a Formally Open and Materially Exclusive Democracy Read chapter Read first chapter

2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

3. A Model of Public Choice with Clientelism and Corruption: Introducing the Analytical

Authors : Andrés Cendales, Nestor Garza, Santiago Arroyo

Published in: Analytical Narrative on Subnational Democracies in Colombia

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This chapter introduces a model of public choice with the purpose of explaining the existing relationship between clientelism, corruption, public expenditure, and the quality of public policy, at the municipal level. The model has as reference, the municipal political system that is configured at a later time to the political, administrative, and fiscal decentralization of 1991 in Colombia. In consequence, based on this narrative about the evolution of the Colombian Pacific political regime and the qualitative evidence it provides, we would like to build a theoretical model in the context of game theory. If the equilibrium strategies of the players coincide with their strategies detected in the pattern of institutional behavior, it will be affirmed that the theoretical model explains the behavior patterns detected in the narrative. Our main contribution is to demonstrate the following result: The faction that wins the elections for the mayor’s office is the one for which the average expenditure of obtaining one vote is the lowest, due to its capacity to hire the grass-roots politicians with the greatest social capital, and to whom the highest salaries are paid. Once this political faction obtains control of the mayor’s office, it seeks to assign public contracts to members of its organization in a corrupt manner. This has the purpose of misappropriating, for private consumption, a certain amount of those public resources from such public contracts. The aforementioned contributes to a reduction in the quality of public policy, in such a way that this reduction will be greater whenever the assessment that the faction has for the provision of public goods diminishes, or the average expenditure incurred by the faction increases, in obtaining a vote in the elections. As a corollary to the above, it is possible to affirm that the greater the number of mayorships under the control of political factions, the greater the deterioration in the quality of public policy at the local level.

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previous chapter Narrative on Local Democracies, Government, and Public Policy in the Colombian Pacific
next chapter Political Factions and Public Policy in the Local Democracies of the Colombian Pacific: Empirical Evidence
Footnotes
1
It is a symptom of a crisis of democratic representation the fact that the level of trust in the positions of local democratic representation is very low and also persistent. In fact, the existence of a high institutional weakness causes a chronic crisis, due to the political system is not capable of deterring nor punishing the strategies of clientelism and corruption that the political factions carry out.
 
2
An increase in the level of trust in a position of democratic representation, ceteris paribus, only occurs with an institutional change in which both the justice system and the political system have a greater capacity to persuade the strategies of clientelism and corruption that the democratic representative realizes who holds the position. Therefore, the trust in a position of democratic representation is not rooted in the confidence of the person occupying the position, but in the confidence that the institutional system has the ability to detect, sanction, and deter behaviors that fail from the mandate with that the person occupying it must fulfill. If the person who occupies it does not fulfill his mandate, this does not cause a reduction in the level of trust, provided that the citizen trusts justice and political system allows that person to be sanctioned, either electorally or legally.
 
3
It is trivially verified that the average expenditure is equal to the marginal expenditure. That is, the expense incurred by the faction to obtain a vote depends on: the salary paid to the grass-roots politician, the grass-roots politician’s social capital, and the valuation of a citizen by vote.
 
4
See Brooks (2006), Abramowitz et al. (1988: 849); Castillo et al. (2006), Choi (2010), Clarke and Stewart (1994), Godbout and Bélanger (2007a, b); Kinder and Kiewiet (1979), Kramer (1971, 1983), Suzuki (1991), Markus (1988a, b), Mueller (1970), Downs (1957).
 
5
Gersbach and Muhe (2011), Dekel et al. (2008), Desai (2010), Gruner (2009).
 
6
See Lewis-Beck (1988), Norpoth et al. (1991), Powell and Whitten (1993), Whitten and Palmer (1999), Barreiro (2007), MacKuen et al. (1992: 597), Gómez and Wilson (2001, 2003, 2006, 2007); Carey and Lebo (2006: 544).
 
7
It is convenient to point out that the analysis proposed by Downs (1957) is based, not only on the notion of the consumer established in the microeconomic theory, but more importantly, on the notion of markets with perfectly competitive structures (Weber and Myerson 1993: 102).
 
8
The analysis assumes that the mayor and his political organization have the capacity to divert municipal resources from municipal development objectives such as poverty reduction, the provision of primary education services, among others, once the mayor seeks to maximize their own benefits before the benefits of society.
 
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Metadata
Title
A Model of Public Choice with Clientelism and Corruption: Introducing the Analytical
Authors
Andrés Cendales
Nestor Garza
Santiago Arroyo
Copyright Year
2019
Book
Analytical Narrative on Subnational Democracies in Colombia

Print ISBN: 978-3-030-13008-4

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-13009-1

Copyright Year: 2019

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13009-1_3