As We Think -Greatest Thoughts: When young people vote for survival

Sometimes I wonder if young people will have a chance to prosper and attain some of their well-desired aspirations of freedoms such as economic freedom in their lifetime, free education and employment.

 

Phot Credit - https://issafrica.org/

The most famous definition of politics is as the art and science of “who gets what” in society (Lasswell 1958). To help understand “who gets what” many political scientists in the 1970s began to apply the concept of clientelism, first elaborated by anthropologists and sociologists to describe the hierarchical social relations that have long marked the countryside in peasant societies (Schmidt et al. 1977).

The term refers to a complex chain of personal bonds between political patrons or bosses and their clients or followers (Supporters).

These bonds are founded on mutual material advantage: the patron furnishes excludable resources (money, jobs) to dependents and accomplices in return for their support and cooperation (votes, attendance at rallies).

The patron has disproportionate power and thus enjoys wide latitude about how to distribute the assets under their control. In modern polities, most patrons are not independent actors, but are links within a larger grid of contacts, usually serving as middlemen who arrange exchanges between the local level and the national (Kettering 1988).

Typically, the poor and marginalized members of society especially young people are drawn into these “problem-solving networks” as a pragmatic means to find solutions to their everyday concerns, since they often have limited access to formal sources of assistance (Auyero 2000).

 This precarious economic system impels young people to focus on immediate consumption and to forsake more long-term and abstract gains. Variability of income may be more important than poverty alone in driving the demand for clientelism.

Present-day clientelism thus tends to flourish in insecure political and economic environments, both rural and urban and is integral to the “politics of survival” for both patrons and clients (Migdal 1988).

Patron-client networks play an ambiguous role in the fight against poverty. While clientelism can bring benefits to some of the poor, it breeds inequity because it excludes individuals who have no assets with which to negotiate in this regards it will be the young people.

More prosperous people who lack patrons due to ethnicity or partisan affiliation may also be left without access to work or land and other factors of production. People within a patron-client network use state authority and resources to improve their incomes and livelihoods, but even the network participants may be held down because of the unequal or extortionate character of the exchange relationships in which they are trapped. (W. Brinkerhoff & A. Goldsmith 2002).

As We Think - Greatest Thoughts