Conditionality & Coercion: Electoral clientelism in Eastern Europe

This book documents illicit electoral strategies used by candidates in contemporary elections in Romania and Hungary. Political scientists refer to these quid-pro-quo exchanges as clientelism. The authors use a variety of methods to understand how such illegal forms of campaigning persist in contemporary elections in countries of the European Union, as well as novel survey techniques to measure the incidence of different illicit electoral strategies, survey-based experiments to measure how voters evaluate different forms of clientelism, and ethnographic research to document the use of these strategies at elections.Conditionality and Coercion demonstrates that the electoral incentives to use different types of illicit strategies differ systematically across localities.