Non-Policy Politics: Richer Voters, Poorer Voters, and the Diversification of Electoral Strategies (book presentation)

Date: 

Tuesday, April 9, 2019, 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

CGIS South, S030, 1730 Cambridge Street

Speaker: María Victoria Murillo, Professor of Political Science and International Affairs, Columbia University

Moderator: Steven Levitsky, Professor of Government, Harvard University

This book focuses on the non-policy benefits that voters consider when deciding their vote. In addition to proposing policies, parties deliver non-policy benefits, such as competent economic management, constituency service, and patronage. This book provides a unified view of how politicians deliver broad portfolios of policy and non-policy benefits to their constituency. Non-policy resources also shape parties' ideological positions. The book shows which type of electoral offers parties target to either poorer or richer voters and their implications in terms of democratic responsiveness. The theory is tested using both qualitative and quantitative research to establish how linkages between parties and voters shape the delivery of non-policy benefits in Argentina and Chile in the 2000s.

María Victoria Murillo is a Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at Columbia University. She is the author of Labor Unions, Partisan Coalitions, and Market Reforms in Latin America (Cambridge University Press 2001), Political Competition, Partisanship, and Policymaking in the Reform of Latin American Public Utilities (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and with Ernesto Calvo of Non-Policy Politics: Richer Voter, Poorer Voter and the Diversification of Parties Electoral Strategies (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and with Daniel Brinks and Steven Levitsky of The Politics of Institutional Weakness: Lessons from Latin America (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).