IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/not/notnic/2025-05.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

State capacity, informality and clientelism

Author

Listed:
  • Giuliana Pardelli
  • Julieta Peveri

Abstract

Understanding how to tackle clientelism is crucial for enhancing political accountability. While its negative impacts on governance are well-documented, less is known about strategies to disrupt these networks. This paper argues that stricter enforcement of labor regulations can weaken clientelistic practices. Using an instrumental variable approach based on within-municipality changes in proximity to labor offices and state-level variations in labor inspectors in Brazil, we find that enhanced enforcement significantly reduces the electoral success of clientelistic parties and curtails patronage and vote-buying. These outcomes are largely driven by a decline in informal workers, who are more likely to support clientelistic parties.

Suggested Citation

  • Giuliana Pardelli & Julieta Peveri, 2025. "State capacity, informality and clientelism," Discussion Papers 2025-05, Nottingham Interdisciplinary Centre for Economic and Political Research (NICEP).
    • Handle: RePEc:not:notnic:2025-05
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/nicep/documents/working-papers/2025/2025-05.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:not:notnic:2025-05. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Hilary Hughes (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nicepuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.