Abstract
This chapter introduces a model of public choice with the purpose of explaining the existing relationship between clientelism, corruption, public expenditure, and the quality of public policy, at the municipal level. The model has as reference, the municipal political system that is configured at a later time to the political, administrative, and fiscal decentralization of 1991 in Colombia. In consequence, based on this narrative about the evolution of the Colombian Pacific political regime and the qualitative evidence it provides, we would like to build a theoretical model in the context of game theory. If the equilibrium strategies of the players coincide with their strategies detected in the pattern of institutional behavior, it will be affirmed that the theoretical model explains the behavior patterns detected in the narrative. Our main contribution is to demonstrate the following result: The faction that wins the elections for the mayor’s office is the one for which the average expenditure of obtaining one vote is the lowest, due to its capacity to hire the grass-roots politicians with the greatest social capital, and to whom the highest salaries are paid. Once this political faction obtains control of the mayor’s office, it seeks to assign public contracts to members of its organization in a corrupt manner. This has the purpose of misappropriating, for private consumption, a certain amount of those public resources from such public contracts. The aforementioned contributes to a reduction in the quality of public policy, in such a way that this reduction will be greater whenever the assessment that the faction has for the provision of public goods diminishes, or the average expenditure incurred by the faction increases, in obtaining a vote in the elections. As a corollary to the above, it is possible to affirm that the greater the number of mayorships under the control of political factions, the greater the deterioration in the quality of public policy at the local level.
Colombia is deeply outraged. Corruption is everywhere and we have discovered that it is the “system”. (…) the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor was captured by corrupt, (…) three former presidents of the Supreme Court of Justice were linked to the toga cartel. All this is due to clientelism and the way in which the policy has been conducted to reach all corners and steal our country. Do not be fooled, corruption comes to power in elections. It is in the elections where the frontal fight against corruption is determined. Those who pay to arrive, come to steal. The first point to fight against corruption is to vote, to choose honest people. Sergio Fajardo. Presidential Debate, Colombia, 2018.
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Notes
- 1.
It is a symptom of a crisis of democratic representation the fact that the level of trust in the positions of local democratic representation is very low and also persistent. In fact, the existence of a high institutional weakness causes a chronic crisis, due to the political system is not capable of deterring nor punishing the strategies of clientelism and corruption that the political factions carry out.
- 2.
An increase in the level of trust in a position of democratic representation, ceteris paribus, only occurs with an institutional change in which both the justice system and the political system have a greater capacity to persuade the strategies of clientelism and corruption that the democratic representative realizes who holds the position. Therefore, the trust in a position of democratic representation is not rooted in the confidence of the person occupying the position, but in the confidence that the institutional system has the ability to detect, sanction, and deter behaviors that fail from the mandate with that the person occupying it must fulfill. If the person who occupies it does not fulfill his mandate, this does not cause a reduction in the level of trust, provided that the citizen trusts justice and political system allows that person to be sanctioned, either electorally or legally.
- 3.
It is trivially verified that the average expenditure is equal to the marginal expenditure. That is, the expense incurred by the faction to obtain a vote depends on: the salary paid to the grass-roots politician, the grass-roots politician’s social capital, and the valuation of a citizen by vote.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
- 7.
- 8.
The analysis assumes that the mayor and his political organization have the capacity to divert municipal resources from municipal development objectives such as poverty reduction, the provision of primary education services, among others, once the mayor seeks to maximize their own benefits before the benefits of society.
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Cendales, A., Garza, N., Arroyo, S. (2019). A Model of Public Choice with Clientelism and Corruption: Introducing the Analytical. In: Analytical Narrative on Subnational Democracies in Colombia . SpringerBriefs in Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-13009-1_3
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