5 - Patronage, Favors, and the Personalization of Public Administration

Summary

In countries around the world – from Bolivia (e.g., Lazar 2004) and Ghana (e.g., Brierley forthcoming; Driscoll 2018) to Mexico (e.g., Chambers-Ju 2021; Larreguy, Montiel Olea, and Querubin 2017) and Pakistan (e.g., Callen, Gulzar, and Rezaee 2020) – public sector employees are involved in electoral mobilization. In Argentina, the number of public employees involved in this mobilization by helping with electoral campaigns, attending rallies, and monitoring elections is in the range of 12–22 percent (see Chapter 4). One of the advantages that incumbents enjoy in utilizing public employees as political workers is that patronage agreements do not end on Election Day; patronage employees also provide political services between elections. In this chapter, I focus on one of the main activities that patronage employees perform between elections: the provision of favors.