Chapter 4 considers dilemmas that arise for “successful” LGBT movements with increasing access to and interactions with state bureaucracies. The chapter applies an intersectional lens to neoliberal inclusion to reveal how inclusion along one dimension (sexuality) may constrict organizations along other dimensions (access to resources), influencing the ability of organizations to deploy their identity strategies. The chapter first examines how, in Argentina, activists who took up salaried positions in the bureaucracy were able to deploy their strategy of lesbian visibility from within the state to advance pro-LGBT public policy. However, activists’ engagement with the state weakened the organization and compromised its ability to deploy its identity strategy in the public sphere. The chapter then contrasts this example of state engagement with Free Gender’s decisions in South Africa. Free Gender declined to participate in a major national initiative and chose instead to engage with local police and deploy its identity strategy in these interactions. The chapter concludes by drawing lessons about the consequences of neoliberal inclusion on LGBT organizations, specifically how it may limit their potential to effect change regardless of the choice organizations make to engage the state or not.

Chapter 5 examines incumbency bias in settings where incumbents have high capacity: Argentina and Brazil. Though governors wield high levels of responsibility, they do so with far less severe fiscal restrictions than Brazilian mayors. In both cases, revenue flows are fairly stable and fund a high proportion of spending. At the same time, Argentine governors reportedly often win elections by disbursing patronage and buying votes, making them a least likely case for my theory. However, the analysis indicates that in both cases, spending on public goods is just as effective as spending on personnel for building an incumbency advantage. The contrast between Brazil and Argentina also helps examine the theory’s predictions regarding how party organizations affect the type of incumbency bias. While strong yet nonprogrammatic parties allow parties and candidates to benefit from incumbency advantage in Argentina, high levels of personalism restrict Brazilian candidates’ incumbency advantage. Lastly, the chapter shows that in Argentina public goods spending has a stronger effect on incumbency bias that proxies for patronage and clientelism.

Chapter 6 investigates a setting with a narrow policy scope and low expectations. Unlike their Brazilian counterparts, Chilean mayors are not expected to implement important policies; the national government controls most public goods provision. Consistent with the book’s theory regarding settings with low expectations, mayors in Chile enjoy an incumbency advantage. The chapter also establishes that the ayors’ ability to obtain a return from holding office hinges on fiscal transfers and public goods spending. Chile also offers a natural experiment for examining theoretical expectations about the sources of personal versus partisan incumbency bias. During the most recent electoral cycle, some mayors were subject to term limits, while others were allowed to seek reelection. The chapter analyzes the impact of this institutional change using a differences-in-differences design. The results suggest that Chilean mayors’ incumbency advantage is strictly personal, as the theory predicts for settings with personalistic parties.

This chapter offers the final remarks. First, it recapitulates that slums and vulnerable neighborhoods’ spatial segregation compels their residents to seek out brokers who can facilitate their access to state resources. Machine parties excel in recruiting brokers to connect with voters in pockets of poverty, with the Peronist Party (PJ) in Argentina, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in Mexico, and the Indian National Congress (INC) in India traditionally viewed as classic examples. However, this book challenges the conventional perception of these parties by demonstrating that segregated vulnerability imposes conditions on any party seeking electoral competitiveness in these areas. Specifically, it details how challengers to the PJ, PRI, and INC developed their networks and ultimately disrupted the long-standing dominance of these machine parties. This chapter reviews how the book challenges the notion that some parties are inherently more machine-based than others. Second, the chapter recalls that it is misleading to assume that the disappearance of brokers would necessarily benefit the poor. The root of clientelism and its associated issues lies not in the existence of brokers but in the segregated vulnerability and isolation of these territories – in essence, poverty shapes politics. This perspective reframes the role of brokers as a response to structural conditions rather than a cause of political dysfunction.

Papal patronage has often been limited to the question of whether this or that pope loved art. Yet, the pontiff was only one of several actors involved in the realization of artistic projects symbolizing the Church’s cultural, religious, and political power. Papal patronage, in the sense of conflating the roles of initiator, commissioner, and financial backer, only came into its own after 800. At the same time, a long-lasting debate, rooted in the Classical discourse on luxuria and magnificentia, focused on the legitimacy of spending Church money on material beauty. This was resolved around 1500 when papal patronage became framed as magnificentia and charity, in line with the concept of “evergetism,” or collective service to society. This led to an active papal policy to use the arts, in conjunction with Counter Reformation visual propaganda, to strengthen the Faith, with an important impact on artistic developments primarily during the early modern period.

A vast scholarly literature addresses the question of why voters in certain electoral districts receive larger allocations of discretionary government resources than voters in others. When resource allocations are found to be positively correlated with electoral support for a ruling party across electoral districts, then it is presumed to favor core supporters. When resource allocations are found to be negatively correlated with support for a ruling party across electoral districts, then it is presumed to favor swing voters. The tournament theory offers an alternative explanation for why resource allocations can vary so substantially across electoral districts. When politicians use tournaments between the municipalities in their electoral districts to win elections, then across electoral districts, the size of a district’s resource allocation will be influenced by the relative sizes of municipalities therein. Moreover, this variable – district-level asymmetry – is expected to act on both electoral support and resource allocations: lowering lowers electoral support and increasing resource allocations. This chapter uses a host of regression specifications to test these two hypotheses using data from Japan, 1980–2014. In doing so, it provides an original account for why money is negatively correlated with support across electoral districts in Japan.

This chapter provides a short summary of the book’s contributions to comparative politics, political economy, and Japanese politics. Then, it sketches out a range of questions pertaining to different genres of research in political science, which future scholarship should address.

This chapter presents an overview of the book’s theory, empirics, and contributions to the study of Japanese politics. The theory is in two parts. First, I make the case that when politicians run for office in electoral districts divisible into groups of voters, from whom electoral support is discernible and to whom central government resources are deliverable, they can pull those groups into clientelistic exchanges, in which the amount of money groups receive is tied to how they vote. Second, I consider the nuts and bolts of how a politician can go about tying a group’s resource allocation to its electoral support. I elucidate one method that politicians in a dominant party will be able to use. The chapter then presents an overview of the empirical strategy used to test the theory, which uses regression analyses of original data on resource allocations and voting behavior in Japanese municipalities, 1980–2014, buttressed by qualitative evidence. Finally, the chapter presents a summary of the headline findings for scholars of Japanese politics. Ultimately, the book helps to account for why a single party, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), has been able to win almost every election in Japan.

Politicians in all democracies have goods to distribute, and they employ different modes of distribution to deliver them. They can offer voters goods in the hope those goods turn into votes. Alternatively, they can try to make the distribution of a good conditional on how someone votes. The latter mode is clientelism. I point out that the literature on clientelism has been preoccupied with the idea that politicians form clientelistic relationships with individuals. This has led to an intense scholarly focus on how politicians can consummate such vote buying deals to their satisfaction, given that the secret ballot prevents them from observing how people vote. I argue that under a certain configuration of political institutions, it makes sense for politicians to form clientelistic relationships with groups of voters. To do so, a politician’s electoral district must be divisible into groups of voters, at which electoral support is observable and to which resources are targetable. I take four longstanding questions of interest in the clientelism literature, concerning brokers, economic development, democratic integrity, and club goods and explain how the theory of group-based clientelism opens up new lines of inquiry in each.

This chapter evinces that the engagement of Spanish imperial officials with distant societies utterly foreign to them was only possible thanks to the clever use of their networks of patronage. Patrons, clients, and brokers played a vital role in shaping the officials’ activities. By looking at some of these networks from an imperial perspective, new light is shed on how the culture of bounty and clientelism, which was based on personal and local linkages, adapted to the global dynamics and new geographies, thus facilitating the government of the empire, even in regions thousands of miles away from the core of those networks. Furthermore, the chapter shows that royal service was a familial endeavor, including, of course, the wives. Although often contradictory, the networks, goals, and means of the officials’ kin and those of the monarchy were interwoven and became almost indistinguishable.

This chapter shows how a hierarchical organization and a dominant faction were crucial prerequisites for the strategy of instrumentalism. The union’s hierarchical structure enabled it to mobilize teachers in elections and a dominant faction enabled negotiations with political parties from across the ideological spectrum. The last section analyzes the political backlash against instrumentalism in 2013, which resulted in leadership turnover and policy changes that weakened the union overall. Despite this backlash, however, the union’s internal organization remained largely intact and union leaders continue to be ideologically flexible, in line with the main argument in this book.