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9781107423213

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'This book offers a succinct and insightful account of the workings of patronage and vote buying in Argentina. Professor Weitz-Shapiro shows that middle-class voters may break away from the perverse equilibrium of beliefs and strategies involved in clientelism, inducing politicians to supply higher quality social protection policies. She provides hope for the improvement of the quality of governance in new democracies. The book is a must-read for scholars of social policy and development around the world.' Alberto Diaz Cayeros, Stanford University, California 'Even in polities where clientelism is widespread, some politicians choose alternative electoral strategies. By highlighting its political costs as well as benefits, and providing experimental evidence that vote buying generates hostility among the middle classes, Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro illuminates how clientelism may be curbed. All students of developing democracies will want to read her book.' Thad Dunning, University of California, Berkeley 'This book takes on an important question in contemporary scholarship in comparative politics in a serious and sophisticated way. Professor Weitz-Shapiro provides a theory that jointly accounts for both the costs and benefits of clientelism in explaining choices by mayors to engage in, or forego, clientelist politics. This is a novel claim, and it certainly is backed by the most sophisticated effort at theory testing of such a model of which I am aware.' Marcus Kurtz, Ohio State University 'Professor Weitz-Shapiro's book is both an original and important contribution to a set of seminal questions in comparative politics that remain unresolved. It will both improve the state of knowledge on clientelism and push the scholarly debate forward. I plan to use her book as an example in my research methods course, which emphasizes conceptualization and measurement as the fundamental building blocks to research design.' Pauline Jones Luong, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 'Weitz-Shapiro's book is an important contribution to the study of subnational politics because the potential costs clientelism may have for politicians are rarely analyzed.' Michael Buehler, Publius: The Journal of Federalism

Author Information

Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro is the Stanley J. Bernstein Assistant Professor of Political Science at Brown University, Rhode Island. Her research has been published in the American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, the Journal of Latin American Politics and Society, the Journal of Politics, and Latin American Research Review. She was the recipient of the Sage Prize for Best Paper in Comparative Politics presented at the 2011 American Political Science Association Annual Meeting. Professor Weitz-Shapiro has been a visiting scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences at the Juan March Institute in Madrid and a Fulbright Scholar in Argentina. She has conducted fieldwork in Argentina and Brazil, and has received funding from the National Science Foundation, among other sources. She holds a PhD from Columbia University, New York and an AB from Princeton University, New Jersey.

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