Penalties for Particularism and Partisanship? Citizens’ Preferences for Legal Punishment of Clientelism

In weak-state settings, clientelism is persistent yet normatively fraught, constituting a “legal gray area”. This study examines two key features of commonplace clientelism that may govern whether and to what extent citizens deem it punishable by the law. We posit a “par-ticularism penalty,” by which citizens desire greater punishment for actions targeting narrower social groups, and an “outgroup actor penalty”, by which preferred punishment is greater for ethnic-political opponents. A survey experiment with Kikuyu and Luo respondents in Kenya reveals that respondents prefer more punishment for explicitly targeting supporters — coethnics or copartisans — versus general people, with little difference between coethnics and co-partisans, regardless of the perpetrator’s partisanship. At the same time, they systematically prefer more punishment for partisan outgroup actors. These findings underscore that public opinion would support a legal evolution away from clientelism towards supporters, even as citizens remain more lenient towards ingroup members.