🧭 The Puzzle

Prevailing explanations hold that parties diversify linkages from the top down—offering programmatic policies to wealthier voters while dispensing particularistic inducements to poorer voters. Those frameworks struggle to explain why programmatic parties sometimes combine policy platforms with clientelistic distribution within municipalities, where voter socioeconomic differences and variation in electoral competition are limited.

🔎 Evidence from Multiyear Interviews in Three Chilean Municipalities

• 97 in-depth interviews conducted during multiyear fieldwork across three Chilean municipalities.
• Interviews covered party behavior, neighborhood groups, and local distribution practices.

📌 Key Findings: Demand-Driven Clientelism and Outsourcing

• Programmatic parties engage in clientelistic practices at the municipal level when they face bottom-up demands from local groups.
• Rather than shouldering the costs directly, programmatic parties outsource clientelism to neighbourhood associations.
• Neighbourhood associations perform targeted distribution in exchange for addressing group demands, allowing parties to combine programmatic offers with particularistic dispensing.
• This mechanism explains the variety of linking strategies used by parties in municipal settings where standard top-down, socioeconomic-targeting models do not fit.

⚖️ Why It Matters

• Shifts attention from a strictly top-down view of party linkages to a demand-driven account of clientelism in programmatic contexts.
• Identifies territorially-rooted local groups as crucial actors that shape how parties link to voters at the local level.
• Clarifies how programmatic parties can preserve policy platforms while accommodating particularistic, local demands through delegated arrangements.