No dia 9 de janeiro, Gonzalo Contreras (Center for Inter-American Policy & Research, Tulane University) será o orador de um seminário do Grupo de Investigação RIGoP com o tema A Pathways of Claim-Making: Direct Appeals, Organisational Mediation, and Clientelism. A partir das 11h, na sala 1 do ICS-ULisboa & online.

Abstract: 

Although claim-making for state resources is a global phenomenon, we know little about how different modes of approaching the state shape political outcomes. We employ a sequential mixed-method design to theorise when and how claim-making relates to one such outcome: clientelistic dynamics. We unpack claim-making by applying a supervised machine learning model to classify 36,073 hearing requests submitted by citizens to mayors across Chile’s 345 municipalities. We find that targeted requests are more prevalent in poorer municipalities, while programmatic demands are more frequent in wealthier ones, as expected. Crucially, we also find sharp differences between demands channelled through local intermediaries and those advanced directly by individuals, regardless of the type of request. To further explore this often neglected variation, we conducted five years of fieldwork to trace patterns of mediated and unmediated claim-making. Our fine-grained qualitative evidence complements the quantitative findings: although targeted requests are predominantly made directly by individuals, those channelled through local intermediaries tend to facilitate conditions that activate relational clientelism. These findings have significant implications for understanding the behavioural foundations of claim-making and for scholars seeking to disaggregate the demand side of clientelism. Future research should account for the mediated/unmediated dimension of claim-making in explanatory models to address endogeneity arising from omitted variable bias.