VOTE SELLING, PARTY SERVING AND CLIENTELIST BENEFIT-SEEKING: CITIZEN ENGAGEMENT IN POLITICAL CLIENTELISM IN THE WESTERN BALKANS

This doctoral thesis focuses on a less explored aspect of the political clientelist exchange: the role of citizens in political clientelism. It offers an original theoretical argument on the divergent clientelist engagement of citizens and probes the derived assumptions while using empirical data from the Western Balkan region (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia and Serbia). The thesis argues that one may distinguish between different types of clients when focusing on the services that they provide in return for the benefits which they obtain. As a result, the study distinguishes between clients who offer only electoral services to political parties in return for petty clientelist benefits (electoral clientelism) and clients who offer extended political services relevant for the building of party organizations in return for grand clientelist benefits (patronage). Party services provided in the past are thus best seen as a form of non-material resource that may be utilized in clientelist bargaining by citizens-clients and which is converted to material benefits through clientelist transactions. The author thus proposes that the variations of citizen engagement are prompted by the individual clients’ divergent resource bases, with the resource base being consisted of both non-material and material resources relevant for political clientelism. Clients who are after grand benefits engage in political clientelism while providing extended party services (and thus accumulate political resources) in comparison to clients who extract petty clientelist benefits; and clients who are better-off in material terms engage in clientelism in order to obtain benefits of higher material value in comparison to poor clients. These assumptions are tested against survey data from the Western Balkan region while examining the differences between clients involved in exchanges of votes for benefits and in citizen-initiated clientelist transactions (multivariate logistic regression analysis). Qualitative data consisted of semi-structured interviews with citizens is used in order to describe the main differences between the two sets of clients. The thesis also relies on original fieldwork conducted in the region consisted of expert information collection. The thesis also aims to contribute to conceptual advancement in understanding the varieties of political clientelism. Beside developing a distinction between different types of benefits and services exchanged through clientelism (i.e. petty and grand benefits/services), the thesis offers a typology of clientelist exchanges and corresponding patron and client strategies of engagement. Following the typology, citizens engage in political clientelism through vote selling, turnout selling, abstention selling, party serving and clientelist benefit-seeking. The first three types are characteristic for the one-off electoral exchanges while the latter two for the iterated exchanges of patronage.