1 - Introduction

Summary

Clientelism and ethnic favoritism, in combination, riddle the diverse societies of the developing world. Politicians dole out patronage rewards to coethnics by building schools in their villages, paving roads in their neighborhoods, packing the civil service with community members, handing out medicine to supporters, and “fixing” their parking tickets. In exchange, citizens offer up their political support to elites not because of programs or ideology, but rather because of payoffs facilitated by shared ethnicity. To most people, then, the “who gets what” questions of day-to-day politics appear to have ethnic answers.

As familiar as this stylized account of ethnically-based clientelism may be, it misses a crucial part of the story. To wit: the purported beneficiaries of ethnic favoritism, the mass constituents whose support puts their coethnics in power, often receive meager rewards in exchange. They may get jobs in the civil service but are paid a pittance to do them, a school for their village without desks or even roofs, or a dirt-floor building for a health clinic without staff or electricity. Ethnic favoritism can help us explain why desirable resources flow along ethnic lines, but it cannot explain why, for many people, the flow is closer to a trickle than a deluge. How, then, can ethnic favoritism coexist with ethnic neglect? Why would citizens tolerate poor services instead of shopping their political support around? Under what conditions can politicians get away with taking their coethnic constituents for granted?

The answer I propose in this book is the ethnic monopsony: a political constituency defined along communal lines that is dominated by a single, votebuying patron or party. Clientelistic relationships are susceptible to uncertainty and opportunism, but ethnic networks facilitate patron–client exchange between coethnics by reducing their transaction costs. These transactionsbased advantages, however, segment the vote market into ethnic constituencies with high barriers to entry and exit. When coethnic elites vie against each other for support within their community, they compete to provide benefits to community members to win their backing. When, in contrast, a single, hegemonic leader dominates an ethnic group, the absence of credible coethnic rivals shelters that leader from internal contestation for community support. Protected from competitive pressures, monopsonists enjoy the luxury to pick and choose which coethnics to patronize, and offer more modest rewards than a competitive market would fetch.