What is political clientelism? Definition, examples from Spain and how to break it

Political clientelism is the trade of targeted material benefits for political support. A party or politician hands a person or a group something concrete, a public job, a contract, a grant, a licence, help with a file, and expects their vote, their work at election time or their loyalty in return. What makes it clientelism is that the benefit depends on the political behaviour. A pension paid to everyone over 65 is a policy. A job offered to a supporter because they campaigned is clientelism.

Political scientists have refined the definition. Allen Hicken, in a 2011 review for the Annual Review of Political Science, identifies four elements, as the Wikipedia entry on the concept summarises them. The relationship is dyadic, running both ways between patron and client. It is contingent, because the benefit depends on what the citizen does politically. It is hierarchical, because the politician holds more power than the voter. And it is iterated: the exchange repeats, which is what lets both sides trust it.

A related word causes confusion. Patronage is often used as a synonym, but Susan Stokes and her co-authors use it more narrowly for the flow of benefits inside a party to its members, for example public jobs for loyal members. Clientelism is the wider exchange with voters. In everyday Spanish both end up under enchufismo. Clientelism is also one of the ten problems in the launch speech of Democracia 21, which our programme has spent this week analysing.

How it works and why it lasts

The most recent survey of the research is a chapter for the Handbook of Political Economy by Jimmy Graham, Horacio Larreguy and Pablo Querubín, issued as an NBER working paper in January 2026. Their abstract describes politicians relying on brokers who connect them with voters, and both links of that chain, politician to broker and broker to voter, carry agency problems. Monitoring, selection and social networks are what hold the exchanges together. Their verdict on the consequences is blunt: clientelism undermines electoral accountability and fosters rent-seeking and the underprovision of public goods. Economic underdevelopment makes clientelism easier, and clientelism may in turn keep a place underdeveloped.

The mechanism explains the damage. When votes are bought with private favours, a politician gains little from building a good school or a road everyone uses, and voters lose their main weapon, which is to throw out a government that performed badly. The Wikipedia entry also cites research linking clientelism to corruption and finding that voters in clientelist systems are less willing to punish corrupt politicians.

Francis Fukuyama, whose Political Order and Political Decay we explained here, adds history. In Branko Milanovic's reading, Fukuyama treats clientelism as a form of "proto-accountability": the patron at least has to deliver something. Countries that democratised before building a professional civil service, Greece and Italy among them, slid into clientelist politics; Germany, which built its bureaucracy first, avoided it. The United States after Andrew Jackson was a clientelist prototype, cleaned up later through the Progressive Era and the New Deal.

Spain's version: caciquismo

Spain has its own name for it. During the Restoration that began in the 1870s, the Conservative and Liberal parties alternated in power by arrangement. Enrique Orduña Rebollo's history of the provincial councils, published by the Fundación Democracia y Gobierno Local, describes the mechanism. Candidacies were agreed between the regime's parties and local oligarchies, and the resulting share-out of seats, the encasillado, was drawn up at the Interior Ministry, so the incoming government always had its majority. In the countryside the caciques, local figures with social, economic or administrative weight, controlled large groups of voters directly. Joaquín Costa, in Oligarquía y caciquismo, called this network the real form of government in Spain. The cities were harder to manage: Madrid gave the majority to a republican list in the first general election held under the universal suffrage law.

The past still matters. Our piece on clientelism and growth looked at what the Bank of Spain found about institutional quality and productivity. Transparency International's 2025 Corruption Perceptions Index gives Spain 55 points out of 100, ten fewer than in 2012, one of the largest drops in Western Europe, and notes the country's largest protests in years over corruption.

Who feels cheated

Donald Warren's The Radical Center, from 1976, adds a political warning. His Middle American Radicals, as John Judis recalls in a piece for the Carnegie Endowment, saw government as favouring both the rich and the poor at the same time. People in the middle, who pay and get little discretionary help, read every targeted favour as proof that the game is rigged. Clientelism damages trust well beyond the people it buys, and the resentment it creates feeds populism.

The radical-centre answer

The left is right that public help belongs to citizens as a right, and that nobody's job, grant or benefit should depend on their vote. The right and the liberal market tradition are right that impersonal rules, open competition and merit-based hiring shrink the discretion patrons trade on. The idea that fits neither camp neatly is mechanical: make benefits automatic and rule-based wherever possible, paid on the basis of data the state already holds, so there is nothing left for a broker to hand out. Then publish who received what, in a form a neighbour or a journalist can read.

Spain already has tools for parts of this, such as the tax data that can trigger payments automatically and competitive exams for the civil service. The work is to extend them to the places where discretion still lives, such as interim posts, small contracts and discretionary grants. Our five-column exercise proposes the indicators that would show whether it works.