| dc.description.abstract | Why would a politician collude with a criminal group? Conventional wisdom generally depicts politicians as either passive recipients of bribes or the targets of criminal violence, even when interacting cooperatively. In contrast, I demonstrate that politicians often benefit from – and even seek out – deals with criminal organizations. I develop a theory of criminal clientelism, a behavior where candidates hire criminal group members to deliver votes, to argue that deal-striking with criminal groups can be an unexpectedly successful election-winning strategy.
The central argument is that criminal clientelism wins votes through the criminal group’s capacity to serve as a political broker. I show how criminal groups rely on two primary mechanisms to deliver votes and uphold their side of the clientelistic bargain. I call these mechanisms 1) corralling (shaping vote choice and increasing turnout) and 2) gatekeeping (shaping the candidate pool); both reduce electoral competition at the ballot box and increase the returns to criminal clientelism. Tests of my theory suggest that elections are less democratic in criminally controlled areas than in other parts of the state.
I develop this argument through a mixed-methods study of voting behavior, criminal control, and candidate and voter preferences in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This project integrates an in-person survey and experiment administered to citizens subject to criminal governance, an original database on organized criminal group presence, a large-N analysis of electoral data, and 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork. I focus on Rio de Janeiro for theoretical and empirical reasons. This setting has rich within-case variation in the types of collusive agreements and types of criminal groups, ranging from warring drug trafficking organizations to extortion rackets. The subnational variation allows me to hold the broader institutional setting constant to isolate the effect of criminal clientelism on electoral outcomes and eliminate alternative explanations.
Public officials’ willingness to engage with violent, illicit actors around elections drives two secondary questions underpinning this project. First, why are some candidates more likely to collude? I show how a candidate’s risk preferences influence their likelihood of striking a bargain through criminal clientelism and explain how the electoral context and a candidate’s relationship to the community codetermine the terms of the trade.
Second, why are some criminal groups better at delivering votes than others? I argue that protection racket-style criminal groups have a comparative advantage in mobilizing votes because the capabilities needed for voter mobilization are similar to those required to run a successful protection racket. Specifically, protection rackets whose criminal capabilities include monitoring and control over citizens, either through extortion or other means of social control, are more likely to have the tools and infrastructure to influence voters. Groups that protect have a lower opportunity cost of diversifying into electoral politics.
The contribution is to show how the presence of organized crime changes the political arena for both candidates and voters who live under criminal rule. Existing theories usually focus only on what the criminal group can gain from electing a sympathetic candidate. I bring together the criminal governance and clientelism literatures to argue that politicians work with criminal groups and often benefit from doing so. My research advances our understanding of why governments that depend on criminal groups to campaign and win elections implement ineffective crime policies. | |
