Intra-party Competition and Clientelism: An Analysis of Public Sector Employment in Argentina and Turkey.

Distribution of public jobs through political patron-client networks has been taking new forms as a result of the political and socio-economic changes in developing countries like Argentina and Turkey. In this new context, two levels of electoral competition, the general elections and the process of achieving candidacy within the party, have to be analyzed in order to understand the factors that affect the particularistic exchanges between politicians and their supporters. In the internal competition of parties patronage jobs serve as a signal about the ambitions of politicians for leadership in the party. With a game theoretic model, I analyze how the interaction between a follower who sends a signal about his ambitions through patronage jobs and his leader in the party affects the level of patronage jobs that are distributed by the follower. I demonstrate the existence of an equilibrium wherein the follower limits his efforts to build personal political loyalties through distributing jobs in order to signal to his party leader that he is not a threat to her leadership. Two conditions under which this equilibrium exists are of substantive interest: Only when the party's or party leader's support is important for followers' reelection and when the leader's support for other party members carries risks for leadership take-over, that is when the leader is moderately strong in the party, followers have incentives to constrain the level of clientelism in public sector employment. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]