Non-policy politics: richer voters, poorer voters, and the diversification of electoral strategies

Calvo and Murillo consider the non-policy benefits that voters consider when deciding their vote. While parties advertise policies, they also deliver non-policy benefits in the form of competent economic management, constituency service, and patronage jobs. Different from much of the existing research, which focuses on the implementation of policy or on the delivery of clientelistic benefits, this book provides a unified view of how politicians deliver broad portfolios of policy and non-policy benefits to their constituency. The authors' theory shows how these non-policy resources also shape parties' ideological positions and which type of electoral offers they target to poorer or richer voters. With exhaustive empirical work, both qualitative and quantitative, the research documents how linkages between parties and voters shape the delivery of non-policy benefits in Argentina and Chile

"Political parties can select the policies they offer, but have different reputations for competence, unequal capacity to mobilize activists, and different resources to deliver pork and patronage. These are crucial non-policy resources shaping their electoral success. We show how these non-policy resources also shape parties' ideological positions and which type of electoral offers they target to poorer or richer voters. Hence, non-policy politics shapes both electoral success and which voters get what. We describe how the book assesses voters' non-policy preferences with detailed survey and administrative data from Argentina and Chile, including a novel methodology for measuring partisan networks, and how those preferences shapes parties policy and non-policy offers"--