communities' experiences with clientelism affect expectations of service provision. Development practitioners need to understand … how social context affects not only the likelihood of vote-buying but also the distributive effects of clientelism. …

We review a decade of literature on clientelism, a central topic in the study of developing democracies. We define … clientelism as the discretionary distribution of public resources by politicians. We distinguish clientelism that occurs in the … pre-electoral period (electoral clientelism) from that which occurs between elections (welfare clientelism). We provide …