Mexico City
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Oct. 15, 2026, 1:41 pm ET
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4 min read
After casting ballots under the watchful eye of a political-party boss in Mexico’s 2000 presidential vote, locals in one sweltering Yucatan town filed out of their neighborhood polling site and went straight next door to collect their reward: a free pork sandwich and an orange juice.
For more than 70 years, Mexico’s powerful Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) perfected a key political transaction. Ordinary citizens provide support – and votes – in exchange for handouts or services from government officials. Rewards can come in many forms, from food packets to roofing materials, or even freshly paved roads. The practice is known as clientelism. And it helped the PRI hold on to power for most of the 20th century.
Yet when the PRI lost power in 2000, and competitive democracy was established in Mexico, clientelism didn’t disappear. It evolved.
That history offers a lens through which to view President Donald Trump’s September promise at a Republican convention in Dallas to give every American adult $5,000 if his party retains control of Congress in November’s midterm elections. For scholars who have studied clientelism in Latin America, Mr. Trump’s proposal raises important questions about the relative health of representative democracy in the United States.
“Clientelist practices damage democracy because they distort it,” says Cristina Tapia Muro, a political science professor at the Universidad de Colima, where she has researched how clientelism affects political participation. “Democracy is the exercise of choosing who governs us. But when you introduce the element of exchange, the selection becomes tied to something one receives, rather than stemming from genuine conviction.”
Too rich to “buy”
Forms of clientelism were once a common feature in the U.S., from Tammany Hall in the 1800s to the powerful Chicago political machine in the mid-1900s.
Academics have found that the practice becomes less prominent, however, as votes become too expensive to “buy.”
“It’s often a product of poverty and inequality,” says Noam Lupu, director of the Center for Global Democracy at Vanderbilt University. “History shows us that when inequality declines and when poverty declines, clientelism also declines.”
A ‘Vote Early!’ sign is displayed on a monitor as then-former President Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Reading, Pennsylvania, Oct. 9, 2024.
Latin America is considered one of the most unequal regions in the world. In the U.S., the divide between America’s rich and poor is the widest it has been in a generation, according to the U.S. Federal Reserve. Clientelism “only makes sense if you have billionaires bankrolling elections and people for whom potentially $5,000 is quite a lot of money,” says Dr. Lupu.
Not everyone sees Mr. Trump’s promised payment as a clear case of clientelism, in part because there is no guarantee Mr. Trump can free up the trillions of dollars that delivering on his pledge would require. Clientelism is defined by both parties involved following through on the exchange.
“It’s indicative of the way the president thinks about politics in a very transactional way,” says Dr. Lupu.
“Credit claiming”
These sorts of political transactions were once considered anathema in the U.S. Just before the 2000 presidential election in Mexico, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter traveled there as an election observer. He concluded that “the ruling party was still using undue influence on voters with some threats of losing popular services if the PRI lost.” Mr. Carter said his goal was to encourage Mexicans to vote regardless of “promises or intimidation.”
After Vicente Fox won the race in 2000, he declared in his inaugural address that Mexico’s former, corrupt system of politics had “come to a radical end.”
A new multiparty system took hold in Mexico and put an end to the PRI’s 71-year grip on power. But instead of disappearing, clientelism simply morphed, says Dr. Tapia Muro.
“Attempts have been made to put safeguards and protections in place to curb clientelism,” she says. “What that has done is caused clientelism to change, adapt, and find new ways to slip through the cracks.”
It’s still common to see busloads of voters and their families brought to Mexico City for political rallies, including during President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo’s 2024 campaign. Today, when new social programs are rolled out, they’re accompanied by disclaimers underscoring that the program is not dependent on a specific political party. But politicians still find a way to take credit, what academics call “credit claiming,” Dr. Tapia Muro says.
President Sheinbaum’s party has been accused of using social programs as a form of clientelism. She rejected that claim at a recent event. “We don’t buy votes; we give rights to the Mexican people, which is very distinct,” she said.
This notion that “clientelism is dead” sounded so perfect when the PRI first left Mexico’s top office, says Joy Langston, a professor of political science and a clientelism expert at El Colegio de México.
“But, good intentions didn’t win enough votes fast enough,” she says. “When you have the capacity to mobilize and you have local neighborhood leaders who are willing to lend a hand, clientelism just worked better” for political parties across the board.
Transactional politics doesn’t help build trust for political leaders, says Dr. Lupu. “It’s a complete reversal of what we think the relationship between voters and politicians should be, which is that voters are the ones holding the power over politicians,” he says. “Vote buying undermines accountability.”
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For Edwin Ramírez, who is taking a break from his job as a furniture mover in Mexico City, the old days of getting something concrete from politicians for coming out to vote worked pretty well. “If every politician is looking to help us, we can choose who helps us most,” he says.
Washington decried clientelism in Mexico for decades, So the fact that the U.S. may be picking up where the PRI left off is rich, Mr. Ramírez adds. “I’d call it hypocrisy.”
Source: www.csmonitor.com
