Abstract
A growing literature on patronage and clientelism theorizes the ways in which parties social spending to either induce or reward support among voters. Most studies in this vein base their analyzes on the distribution of a single type of benefit (i.e., government jobs, health care, material assistance, food aid, etc.). A recent critique, however, suggests that, by focusing on a single type of reward, most studies in this literature arrive at biased conclusions, because party patronage and clientelist outreach strategies vary across distinct sectors and types of benefits (Kramon and Posner 2013). In this paper, we aim to assess the validity of this critique by examining patterns of public spending on distinct social services and infrastructure investment at the provincial level in Turkey since the late 1990s. In particular, we focus on education, health, and infrastructure such as roads, sanitation, and electrification. At the same time, we hypothesize that the dynamics of clientelism may vary by region – and not merely by social sector or type of benefit – because parties (including the dominant AKP in Turkey) are not equally well entrenched in all parts of a given national territory and therefore may modify their patterns of social spending and investment accordingly. Our data are derived from both publicly available databases and reports housed at Turkish government ministries. We combine these data with data on Turkish local election results – vote shares and election outcomes for each party – from the 81 provinces in Turkey from the late 1990s to the present, which enables us to trace patterns of social spending and investment over multiple electoral cycles in these various sectors. We complement our econometric results with illustrative case studies from a sub-section of provinces to better illustrate the mechanisms we uncover in the statistical analyses. This paper not only promises to make valuable contributions to the general social science literature on patronage and clientelism but also brings also builds on the growing cross-disciplinary literature on the politics of social spending in Turkey.
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