Publication

In order to better understand clientelism, this article measures the size and structure of political networks in Argentina and Chile. It assesses whether parties have a large enough supply of patrons, bureaucrats, activists and volunteers, which would allow party leaders to properly invest particularistic resources among adequately chosen voters. The authors take advantage of new developments in network analysis to measure the size of hard-to-count populations and to explore network structure in survey data. Using information about the ideological and physical proximity of voters to political networks, they estimate individual-level vote choices.