Essays in Political Economy and Development

Abstract

This dissertation examines how dominant parties sustain power by entrenching themselves through patronage, clientelism, and institutional manipulation. Despite repeated reform efforts, state weakness persists when political loyalty rather than merit drives bureaucratic appointments, when electoral institutions are distorted by partisan actors, and when ruling coalitions are managed through the strategic allocation of rents. I study these dynamics in Latin America, focusing on Paraguay and Venezuela, to understand how parties tilt the electoral playing field and maintain elite cohesion during crises. Together, these cases reveal the organizational and institutional mechanisms through which dominant parties consolidate power at the expense of state capacity, accountability, and democratic competition. The first chapter of the dissertation asks: why are developing country bureaucracies ineffective despite repeated modernization efforts? Patronage (hiring on partisanship rather than merit) is often thought to undermine public sector performance, yet it is difficult to measure and usually studied either among frontline agents or supervisors separately, rather than across hierarchical layers. I emphasize patronage hierarchies, instances where layers of the bureaucracy have patronage hires, and measure how they affect state performance. I study this problem using comprehensive data on around 300,000 shipments inspected by Paraguayan customs and develop a method for identifying patronage hires based on political appointment cycles. My findings suggest that patronage inspectors monitored by a patronage port administrator (patronage pairs) exhibit compounded underperformance. They detect less customs fraud and more often fail to detect fraud subsequently identified by headquarter audits, while also deviating more frequently from prescribed random assignment of inspectors to shipments. Additionally, their fraud detection decreases further when dealing with high shipment volumes at their port, as high workloads can mask lower inspection effort. Finally, patronage pairs make smaller tax adjustments than non-patronage pairs, even among comparable products with similar tax evasion risks. Shipments handled by patronage pairs generate around 11% less tax revenue, undermining state capacity. The second chapter studies how politicians rely on political brokers to buy votes, a phenomenon often found throughout much of the developing world. We investigate how social networks facilitate these vote-buying exchanges. Our conceptual framework suggests brokers should be particularly well-placed within the network to learn about non-copartisans' reciprocity in order to target transfers effectively. As a result, parties should recruit brokers who are central among non-copartisans. We combine village network data from brokers and citizens with broker reports of vote buying, allowing us to use broker and citizen fixed effects. We show that networks diffuse information about citizens to brokers who leverage it to target transfers. In particular, among those citizens who are not registered to their party, brokers target reciprocal citizens about whom they can learn more through their network, and these citizens are more likely to support the brokers' party. Moreover, recruited brokers are significantly more central than other citizens among non-copartisans, but not among copartisans. These results highlight the importance of information diffusion through social networks for vote buying, broker recruitment, and ultimately for political outcomes. The third chapter inquires whether poll workers' partisanship affect electoral outcomes. Many countries use partisan and adversarial vote-counting systems where poll workers are party representatives and mutual control is expected to provide fairness. Yet in countries with multiple parties, these often have de facto unequal capacities to send representatives to all booths. Exploiting quasi-random assignment of voters to booths in Paraguay's 2018 general elections, we estimate that partisan poll workers decrease an opposing party's vote share by up to 1.1 percentage points (pp) and increase theirs by up to 0.7 pp. Our analyses also expose differential effects according to the electoral system. In proportional representation races, established parties have more opportunities to increase their support at the expense of smaller parties. In contrast, single-winner plurality races dampen this effect due to the winner-take-all aspect of these races. Our results inform the institutional design of vote-counting systems and highlight that adversarial election administration can fail when parties differ in operational capacity. Finally, the fourth chapter investigates whether leaders court or cut the entourage of sidelined elites. We examine the case of Rafael Ramirez, Venezuela's former Oil Czar, who was purged from the Cabinet in late 2014. We find that Ramirez-affiliated individuals and firms became discretely less likely to receive government appointments and contracts upon his purge. Effects on appointments are greatest for high-spending agencies, and firms affiliated with the military and with Nicolas Maduro gained access to government contracts. Downstream agents share the fortunes of their patrons.