This is particularly common in an elite pluralist or rigidly duopolistic system, such as in the United States, where lobbying can have considerable power shaping public policy.
In the 1500s, French political theorist Étienne de La Boétie did not use the term clientelism, but described the practice of emperors who used gifts to the public to gain loyalty from those who were eager to accept what amounted to bribery: Susan Stokes et al. distinguish clientelism as a form of non-programmatic policy within distributive politics.
[1] Within non-programmatic policy, clientelism is then distinguished from 'pork-barrel politics' in that voters are given a benefit or are able to avoid a cost conditional on their returning the favor with a vote.
[12] The patron provides selective access to goods and opportunities, and place themselves or their support in positions from which they can divert resources and services in their favor.
Standard modeling of clientelism assumes that politicians are able to monitor votes, and in turn reward or punish voters based on their choices.
[17] Individual level clientelism can also be carried out through coercion where citizens are threatened with lack of goods or services unless they vote for a certain politician or party.
[19] Stokes' research on clientelism in Argentina assumed that the Peronist Party was providing financial support to prospective voters to buy their votes.
It was hypothesized that Peronists targeted moderately opposed voters because they were thought to be easily persuaded to change sides at the party's minimal expense.
[20] She uses evidence to show that overall smaller communities offer less anonymity, which makes it easier for the patrons to find out who committed to supporting them.
[20] Research by Nichter promoted a simpler hypothesis for the Argentinian election cycle: to prove Peronists that were solely buying supporting voters' turnout, not all of their votes.
[21] He dismissed Stokes's arguments on patrons spying on smaller and poorer communities and instead said the Peronists initially targeted votes assumed to be their strong supporters.
[21] In many young low-income democracies, clientelism may assume the form of group-level targeting in which parties channel benefits to specific groups of voters that are conditional on past or future electoral support.
[5] For group-based targeting to work, parties must find efficient ways to distribute benefits while also holding voters accountable, ensuring that they keep their commitments.
[22] That leads parties to hire intermediaries, often referred to as 'brokers', who supply them with fine-grained information about who needs what and what sorts of voters will and will not vote for them, regardless of the benefit(s) provided.
[24] Some of the more contemporary work underscores the salience of partisan loyalties: politicians direct the bulk of their vote-buying efforts at persuadable swing voters, those who are either indifferent to the party's professed programmatic goals or moderately opposed to them.
Recent studies have shown that in many emerging democracies, parties often lack the organizational capacity to monitor individual-level voting behavior and so they finetune their targeting strategies by updating their beliefs about what sorts of groups have been most responsive to their clientelist appeals.
[5] It is common to link clientelism with corruption; both involve political actors using public and private resources for personal gain, but they are not synonymous.
Corruption is commonly defined as "dishonest and fraudulent conduct by those in power, typically involving bribery",[33] while political clientelism is seen as "the distribution of benefits targeted to individuals or groups in exchange for electoral support".