Economic Coercion

Chapter 6 turns to the analysis of clientelistic strategies premised on economic coercion. In urban settings, the main brokers involved in coercive strategies are employers who threaten employees with a reduction in their wages or with economic layoffs. In rural settings, the main economic brokers are moneylenders, who threaten voters with the worsening of their ongoing economic exchanges. The chapter documents the existence of these coercive strategies using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses. The variation across localities in the incidence of such strategies is likely to be affected by economic conditions that increase the capacity of brokers to withstand efforts of some candidates to reduce their economic influence.