Auyero, Javier - The Practical Logic of Political Domination. Conceptualizing The Clientelist Habitus PDF

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STXXXX10.1177/0735275117725767Sociological TheoryAuyero and Benzecry
Original Article
Sociological Theory
The Practical Logic of

2017, Vol. 35(3) 179–199
© American Sociological Association 2017
DOI: 10.1177/0735275117725767
https://doi.org/10.1177/0735275117725767
Political Domination: st.sagepub.com
Conceptualizing the
Clientelist Habitus
Javier Auyero1 and Claudio Benzecry2
Abstract
This article aims to redirect the study of patronage politics toward its quotidian character
and acknowledge the key role played by brokers’ strong ties with their closest followers to
better understand and explain the practical features of clientelist domination. This article
argues that clientelist politics occur during routine daily life and that most loyal clients’
behavior should be understood and explained neither as the product of rational action
nor the outcome of normative behavior but as generated by a clientelist habitus, a set of
cognitive and affective political dispositions manufactured in the repeated interactions that
take place within brokers’ inner circles of followers. The article also has as a secondary
objective to contribute to dispositional sociology through the conceptualization of the
clientelist habitus. It does so by showing the active work agents engage in as they prevent
disjunctures provoked by what Bourdieu calls the “hysteresis effect.”
Keywords
dispositions, clientelism, political sociology, Pierre Bourdieu, ethnography
Introduction
Why do clients heed the commands of their brokers and patrons? Why do clients remain in
patronage relationships when other options to solve their pressing problems are available?
What is the logic of clientelist domination? Why is it so regular and predictable? Understood
as the individualized exchange of goods or services for political support (Roniger and Günes-
Ayata 1994; Weitz-Shapiro 2014), clientelism has exhibited, to cite Robert Merton’s (1949:71)
still insightful analysis of political machines in the United States, “a notable vitality” in many
parts of the modern world. According to the authors of the most recent survey on this resilient
sociopolitical phenomenon (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007), clientelism is still operating (and
1University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA

2Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA
Corresponding Author:
Claudio Benzecry, Northwestern University, 2-133 Francis Searle Building, 2240 Campus Drive, Evanston, IL 60208-
0001, USA.
Email: cbenzecry@gmail.com
180 Sociological Theory 35(3)
sometimes expanding) not only in the new democracies of Latin America, post-communist
Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and parts of Africa but also, and contrary to the predictions
of those who saw clientelism as a “holdover from pre-industrial patterns that would gradually
disappear in the modernizing West” (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007, p. 3), in many an estab-
lished democracy such as Italy, Austria, and Japan.1
The causes, forms, effectiveness, and impacts on democratic governance and policymak-
ing of this “informal institution” (Helmke and Levitsky 2004) have been the object of much
detailed research and of a few more or less contentious debates (see Martin 2009).
Disagreements persist about the relationship between clientelism and democracy (Fox 2012;
Hilgers 2012a, 2012b; Shefner 2012). Stokes (2005) and Helmke and Levitsky (2004), for
example, emphasize that clientelism is detrimental to formal democratic rules and that it
undermines political representation by entrenching incumbents (see also Magaloni 2014).
Clientelism is said to limit the exercise of citizenship rights (Fox 2012), truncate the ability
voters have to hold politicians accountable (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007; Stokes 2005),
hinder the development of democratic institutions (Hicken 2011), weaken the secrecy of
voting (Stokes 2005), and politicize state bureaucracies (Hicken 2011). It has, in other words,
“profound negative implications for the way in which democracy functions, citizen attitudes
about the quality of their democracy, and the capacity of governments to produce needed
public policies” (Hicken 2011:302). Others note that while clientelism can certainly erode
democratic processes, it can also “accompany, and/or supplement” them (Canel 2012;
Hilgers 2012b), providing clients with “limited protection, advancement, and political rep-
resentation” (Shefner 2012:46).
Similar discords prevail when discussing the relationship between patronage politics and
political-economic development. Some argue that clientelism flourishes in contexts of struc-
tural adjustment and state retrenchment (Calvo and Murillo 2004; Levitsky 2003) or lack of
“state reach” (Martin 2009), while others point out that it also thrives in contexts of state
expansion and populist politics (Penfold-Becerra 2006). Clientelism is also said to obstruct
economic growth (Robinson and Verdier 2003) and deform (more or less) well-intended
poverty programs (Magaloni 2014; see also Nichter 2014; Sugiyama and Hunter 2013).
Consensus is more forthcoming about the impact of democratization on clientelist poli-
tics: By now it is widely agreed that the former does not necessarily entail the decline of
patronage (Roniger and Günes-Ayata 1994; Tilly 2007). Current research in fact persua-
sively shows clientelism’s “systemic resilience and capacity to adapt to changing contexts”
and regimes (Roniger 2012; for an illustrative example, see Canel 2012).
Although diverging in methodology, analytic depth, level of analysis, and empirical
focus, a typical (more or less explicit) micro-sociological sequence can be extracted from
most of these accounts: During electoral campaigns, patrons, through their brokers, distrib-
ute goods and services to residents of typically poor communities who in exchange give
support (e.g., in the form of attendance at rallies) and votes. In this process of exchange, citi-
zens become “political clients.” Agreeing on “where the (clientelist) action is” (i.e., electoral
times), explanations of clients’ behavior diverge between those who point to the existence of
a norm of reciprocity driving their actions (e.g., Lawson and Greene 2011) and those who
highlight rational calculations (e.g., Stokes 2005). When brokers fail to deliver, so most
accounts go, clients quit the relationship either because the balance of reciprocity becomes
skewed or because it is more rational to pursue other ways to satisfy interests (for a classic
study merging both approaches, see Scott 1977a, 1977b). What happens between elections
when the need to obtain votes vanishes and what accounts for the enigmatic behavior of
those clients who stay in patronage relationships despite brokers’ failures to deliver and/or
the presence of better opportunities for solving poor people’s daily problems remain outside
the purview of most current studies of contemporary forms of political clientelism.
Auyero and Benzecry 181
From Everyday Life to Electoral Times

The abundant recent body of work on clientelist politics expresses a three decade–long shift
from what, in a now classic piece, Axel Weingrod (1977) called an “anthropological focus”
toward a “political science” one. The anthropological perspective on patronage focused on a
“particular kind of interpersonal relationship,” with an emphasis on inequality and reciproc-
ity. As Weingrod (1977:324) put it: “The study of patronage as phrased by anthropologists
[was] the analysis of how persons of unequal authority, yet linked through ties of interest and
friendship, manipulate their relationships in order to attain their ends.” While the anthropo-
logical perspective examined patronage as a type of social relationship, the new and now
dominant political science approach focuses on a “feature of government” or a characteristic
of a political party. As Weingrod (1977:324) presciently anticipated it:
In political science studies of patronage the key terms are “bosses” and “political
machines,” or merit versus political appointments. Patronage from this perspective is
therefore largely the study of how political party leaders seek to turn public institutions
and public resources to their own ends, and how favors of various kinds are exchanged
for votes.
Political scientist Rebecca Weitz-Shapiro (2014:5) captures this recent shift well when she
writes:
Earlier definitions of clientelism within the social sciences emphasized that the practice
was embedded in social ties and encompassed the exchange of a broad range of services
and support between patrons and their clients, which were not necessarily political in
nature. . . . Increases in urbanization, economic development, and the salience of
competitive politics in much of the developing world eventually led scholars to shift
their attention to examining how these exchange relationships functioned within the
context of competitive politics.
This shift of analytical emphasis and empirical focus came at a cost. Scholarship won in
precision and calibration (note e.g., the mathematical formulations in Stokes et al. 2013)
while (or probably because) it: (1) limited the scope of analysis to electoral times, (2) nar-
rowed the center of attention to vote-buying and/or turnout buying, and (3) created a strict
division between clients and brokers (necessitated by formal modeling).
As a result of their (now almost) exclusive focus on exchanges (and attendant incentives
and calculations) taking place before and during elections, most studies tend to disregard an
aspect of clientelism first highlighted by anthropological research on the subject, namely, its
embeddedness in everyday life. As the focus on electoral times came to prevail, the routine
and personal character of this “lopsided friendship”—as Julian Pitt-Rivers (1954) famously
characterized it—(key to understanding and explaining the effectiveness and endurance of
clientelism) receded to the point of becoming almost nonexistent. Extant scholarship not
only suffers from an overwhelming focus on electoral times, it is premised on a rigid dichot-
omy between clients and brokers. This strict separation overlooks the crucial role played by
brokers’ inner circles of followers—individuals who while acting as brokers’ auxiliaries are
also the most loyal of clients and whose behavior cannot be accounted for with the usual
explanations of rational calculation or reciprocity.
Focusing almost exclusively on electoral times, most of the current scholarship loses
sight of the everyday character of clientelism. Premised on a hard dichotomy between clients
and brokers, extant scholarship neglects the key (both structural and symbolic) role played
by the broker’s inner circle of followers. Emphasizing either reciprocity norms or rational
calculations as reasons why clients behave as they do, most studies see the voluntaristic
choices of individual clients as the mainspring of their actions, thereby disregarding the
dispositional and practical aspects of clientelist politics. Based on a series of analytic revis-
its of three rounds of fieldwork carried out in the Conurbano Bonaerense (the metropolitan
area surrounding the city of Buenos Aires) and focusing on a micro-sociological level of
empirical analysis, this article aims to redirect the study of patronage toward its quotidian
character and acknowledge the key role played by brokers’ strong ties with their closest,
most reliable followers to better understand and explain the practical features of clientelist
domination that help to account for its enigmatic legitimacy and durability.
To foreshadow the substantive points, the main part of this paper begins with the story of
one particular political group, which in actuality is a composite created out of several obser-
vations made over years of ethnographic research. The story encapsulates the workings of
clientelist networks at the grassroots level as both problem-solving and domination net-
works and the crucial (though usually overlooked) role played by political brokers’ inner
circles of followers. It also serves as a roadmap for the exposition that follows: It moves
from a description of the objective functions of patronage networks to a dissection of its
subjective underpinnings. In sum, our main argument is that clientelist politics occur during
routine daily life (not solely during campaigns and elections) and that most loyal clients’
behavior should be understood as the product of a set of cognitive and affective political
dispositions—a clientelist habitus that is manufactured in the repeated interactions that take
place within brokers’ inner circles of followers.
Daily participation in the dynamic material and symbolic world of grassroots politics
socializes agents into arbitrary (i.e., particular to a specific social group) ways of understand-
ing political work. An internalized and then forgotten political socialization, the clientelist
habitus is the presence of the clientelist network in individuals’ dispositions that guide their
behaviors and thoughts. An “acquired system of generative schemes” (Bourdieu 1990:5), the
clientelist habitus is the source of agents’ political practical sense. What kinds of practices and
representations are generated and organized by the clientelist habitus? If habitus is a principle
of vision and division, how are politics and its actors perceived and classified within the
socio-symbolic world of brokers’ inner circles? Regular, routine engagement with brokers
and patrons produces an understanding of politics as a form of solving daily private and pub-
lic problems (from access to a soup kitchen to the pavement of a street) that is highly person-
alized (this or that broker can obtain this or that private or public good). Within this world,
politics is neither a collective struggle for state power nor a “dirty,” unethical activity (to
mention two alternative understandings of politics that circulate not only in poor neighbor-
hoods but in society at large) but a “helpful” or “useful” practice (“Politics helps a lot . . . ”).
Politics is viewed as potential access to state resources, mediated by the figure of the broker
(“We registered for this state program, through Pedro; always through Pedro, he is always in
the middle”). Accordingly, political brokers are viewed (and judged accordingly) neither as
organizers of a collective will nor as cunning, corrupt actors but as more or less effective
problem solvers (“the broker is like a small municipality, everybody goes there”).
The larger theoretical lesson to be learned from this ethnographic revisit of grassroots
patronage politics is that the meaning of politics (and deeply related, the valuation of a poli-
tician’s worth) does not descend from larger value or symbolic systems but emerges out of
specific situations (Eliasoph 2011; Eliasoph and Lichterman 2003) in which concrete agents
are being socialized, that is, in which agents acquire practical political schemes (Pasquetti
2014). Paraphrasing Lizardo (2011), shared political understandings (cultural knowledge
about what politics is and does) are produced in the daily practical entanglement between
clients, brokers, and patrons as they engage in the practical business of political life.
After a description of our methods and sites, we present a brief review of existing litera-
ture on the meaning and functioning of habitus. We then proceed to examine the everyday
character of clientelism beyond electoral times and its function as both a problem-solving
network for the urban poor (Auyero 2000; Szwarcberg 2010, 2015) and a “domination net-
work” (Knoke 1990). We here revisit Weber’s (1968) notion of domination “by virtue of a
position of monopoly” to characterize the objective function fulfilled by a patronage net-
work. The broker’s inner circle, dissected here, is a central component of the clientelist
network. Clientelism not only lives a life in the objectivity of network exchange, it lives a
second, subjective life in the dispositions it inculcates in some of its actors—dispositions
that ensure the reproduction of this arrangement (Rutten 2007). The last part of this article
scrutinizes this subjective dimension to understand and explain the kind of symbolic domi-
nation patronage politics fosters and sustains.
Methods and Sites

The analysis that follows is based on analytic revisits of three rounds of fieldwork conducted
at four different sites during 1995–1996 (8 months), 2005 (6 months), and 2012 (11 months).
We recoded and analyzed our field notes (350 single-spaced pages) and in-depth interviews (n
= 70) using open and focused coding (Emerson, Fretz, and Shaw 1995). Applying the eviden-
tiary criteria normally used for ethnographic research (Becker 1958, 1970; Katz 1982, 2001,
2002), we assigned higher evidentiary value to conduct we were able to observe versus behav-
ior reported (by interviewees) to have occurred. Individual acts or patterns of conduct recounted
by many observers also received higher evidentiary value versus those recounted by only one
observer. We focused on the divergent experiences of patronage politics according to structural
location within the clientelist networks. We paid specific attention to the everyday aspects of
clientelist politics that are typically overlooked by extant scholarship. Particular attention was
paid to expressions (in the course of daily life, informal conversations, and observations of
activities) that point toward the existence of both affective and cognitive dispositions (usually
difficult to obtain in formal interviews) within certain “clients.”
The three rounds of fieldwork were carried out by the first author in one shantytown, one
squatter settlement, and two poor, working-class neighborhoods all located in the metropoli-
tan area surrounding the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina (for details on fieldwork at each
site, see Auyero 2000, 2007, 2012). In all of these sites, there is a strong presence of patron-
age politics at the grassroots level. Although other political parties carried out clientelist
practices, the analysis that follows is predicated on the study of patrons, brokers, and clients
of the largest political party in the country, the Peronist Party.
The sites are characterized by high levels of poverty as measured by income. The shanty-
town and the squatter settlement are defined by their infrastructural deprivation (unpaved
streets, irregular garbage collection, precarious street lighting, lack of potable water, etc.).
During the past two decades, these sites have seen skyrocketing levels of interpersonal vio-
lence (as measured by homicide rates) (see Auyero and Berti 2015).
Habitus, Doxa, and Social Reproduction

The prereflexive, habitual character of social action has been a central part of sociology’s
conceptual toolkit (Swartz 1997). Bourdieu’s notion of habitus points to the system of dura-
ble schemata through which agents perceive, judge, and act in the world. The acquired prod-
uct of lasting exposure to particular social conditions, the habitus designates the internalization
of external constraints and possibilities embodied as dispositions. Attention to dispositions
(Camic 1986) has a long history in sociology (see Elias 2000) and phenomenology (see
Merleau Ponty 2002), but it was Bourdieu (1977, 1990, 2000) who systematically deployed
the term to understand and explain the logic of practice. Having a disposition inclines some-
one to or prevents someone from acting in a particular way, and it constitutes the ontological
complicity between the agent, his or her practices, and the environment.
The system of dispositions—or habitus—appears in Bourdieu’s work under two guises,
which can actually be considered as two sides of the same coin, describing either how the
habitus produces disjuncture between the individual dispositions and the objective structures
where agents develop their practices or how it produces the confluence between the two
(Bourdieu 2001; see also Brubaker 1985). While some of the empirical material that would
later be deployed to substantiate his analyses is already present in his early ethnographic
work on Algeria (Bourdieu 1962), it is not until Outline of a Theory of Practice that he
develops in full a theory of how disjuncture or adjustment happen.
Hage (2013:15) has noted that the habitus “is a principle of homing and building: of striving
to build the space where one can be at home in the world.” In contexts where that strive is hard
to obtain, we get to see the processes of disjunction and hysteresis that Bourdieu describes in
Outline. In contexts where there is correspondence between the dispositions and the environ-
ment in which those dispositions are enacted, we get to observe the “fish in the water” effect
Bourdieu focuses on in The Logic of Practice (Bourdieu 1990). The formula “structuring struc-
tured structures” points toward this coherence of action as dispositions appear fully as a gen-
erative force that causes actions to feel orchestrated or regulated while feeling improvised and
without a conductor/demiurge on the horizon.2 In both scenarios, Bourdieu develops the
implicit, second-nature, doxic character of the habitus. Understanding how agents deploy strat-
egies means to understand the fuzzy logic, the “feel for the game,” how participation in a field
involves a practical mastery of the worlds we seek to inhabit, as well as the potential for incon-
gruence in new conditions of actualization as “the past survives in the present.”
The concept of habitus has been subjected to numerous theoretical critiques and elabora-
tions (Brubaker 1993; Calhoun, LiPuma, and Postone 1993; Swartz and Zolberg 2005) and
has been creatively and critically deployed in a number of original empirical studies
(Benzecry 2011; Bourgois and Schonberg 2007; Decoteau 2013b; Desmond 2007; Pasquetti
2014; Sallaz 2010; Wacquant 2004). Rarely, however, has the concept been extended into
the microcosm of politics and to the types of dispositions that give shape to the specific
practices that prevail there (but see Mahler 2006).
Both theoretical and empirical work highlight one key component of the concept that is
of crucial importance for our study: the way in which habitus can shed light on the normal-
ization and legitimation of political inequality and the internalization of domination. In this
paper, we focus on the long-term socializing effects of subordination, showing how political
reciprocity works at the constitutive level as the de facto background for how problem solv-
ing is organized. This happens via the production of schemata in which reciprocity is the
only way to organize political activity, going beyond previous studies that have rather
focused on the relationship with a particular patron or boss. In doing this, we show how the
clientelist habitus constitutes clientelist politics as the horizon of intelligibility (the principle
of vision and division, as Bourdieu calls it) for most social practices in the area (e.g., access
to health, food, durable goods, jobs, state welfare).
The article also has as a secondary objective to contribute to dispositional sociology
through the conceptualization of the clientelist habitus. The literature has shown how a dis-
position exists in many forms: primary (as in our “classed” selves), secondary (as in profes-
sional socialization), and tertiary (as for instance when scholars reflect on themselves as
embodiments of a particular practice and its acquisition). Scholarship also shows that dispo-
sitions exist organized around many principles of social division, some more codified and
autonomous, like fields, and others more diffuse and “primordial,” like gender, class, or
nation. In doing so, the existing literature has usually taken for granted distinctions at the
macro level (those larger forms of social classification) from distinctions at the meso level
(e.g., fields, other secondary identifications). Approaching clientelism as a problem-solving
strategy that permeates all spheres of everyday access to resources (food, water, housing,
cash transfer programs, school supplies) allows us to show how the clientelist relationship
becomes less a secondary disposition—like one would expect from how the literature is
partitioned, namely, a disposition activated only during elections—and more a primary one.
The paper also contributes to existing scholarly uses of the notion of habitus by showing
the active work agents engage in as they prevent disjunctures provoked by what Bourdieu
(1977) calls the “hysteresis effect.” Many things changed between when we first conducted
fieldwork on patronage politics in 1995 and our last round of fieldwork in 2012. As numer-
ous changes in government, policies, and elected officials (at the national, provincial, and
municipal levels) have taken place, we have observed both governments that have cut the
access to welfare and others that have extended its reach through numerous plans. We have
also witnessed the changing fortunes of different local patrons. What has not changed, how-
ever, is the political work that brokers and their inner circles carry out to make sure the situ-
ation is not one of disjuncture but one in which the practical sense learned in previous
conditions of acquisition can actualize itself instead of acting as a sort of roadblock for new
trajectories of action to flourish.
How is it that poor people embedded in patronage politics in Buenos Aires learn to take
for granted highly unequal relations? How do long-term, diffuse reciprocity networks serve
to legitimize political domination? How does this contribute to explain the durability of the
schemata of perception that people have to make sense of their everyday political reality?
How is it that despite changing elected officials, sometimes from opposing political factions,
brokers’ inner circles of clients keep engaging in clientelist relationships? In the pages that
follow, we address these questions through a series of ethnographic vignettes that point to
the habitual and doxic-like character of clientelist exchanges.
Problem solving and Domination Networks

José is in his mid-50s and, according to his own recollection, has been involved in
party politics “since . . . forever.” He lives in the newest area of the squatter settlement,
where dirt roads, open sewers, and intermittent garbage collection are the norm. We
meet early in the morning at his home. The large front room doubles as a party
grassroots office. “I tried with a grocery store a few years ago, but it went badly. I met
Norma and decided to open a party office . . . things are going well now. She pays for
gas and electricity . . . and she gives me the air I need to breathe.” Norma is a
councilwoman and powerful political broker in a populous district of the Conurbano
Bonaerense. The “air” she provides to José comes in the form of access to state welfare
resources that he distributes among squatter dwellers. Today, a truck is delivering
hundreds of cartons of milk from the state program Leche para Todos (Milk for
Everybody). Pedro, Rosa, and Margarita are at the office helping José to unload the
crates. A line of mostly women is slowly forming outside the office to pick up the milk.
Some of the cartons (with the emblem, “Not for Sale. Milk For Everybody Program”)
are reserved for Pedro. He will use them to make ice cream that he sells out of his own
grocery store. After an hour or so, all the milk cartons have been handed out and José
sits with Pedro, Rosa, Margarita, and a few other latecomers to go over the tasks of the
state-funded workers’ cooperative they formed a year ago. Today, two of them will be
building sidewalks and making sure the open ditches remain unobstructed.
Rosa is in charge of assigning the tasks for today and the rest of the week. She makes
sure each cuadrilla (working group) has enough people to fulfill each task and that
each coordinator has an attendance sheet handy. As Rosa is going through the lists, the
sounds of pots and pans are increasing in the background. Margarita, Melani, and
Susana are preparing lunch for the 60 residents who usually attend the soup kitchen
that opens Monday through Friday at the party office. The truck delivering fresh
produce has arrived shortly after the milk truck, and the women in charge quickly go
to work. Once done with the supervision of the cooperative’s work, José and Pedro
reorganize the tables and chairs so that the office is ready for lunch. At 12:30 pm, lunch
is served—today, spaghetti with meatballs—mostly for mothers with small children.
After lunch, Margarita, Melani, and Susana, along with Pedro, José, Rosa, and Auyero,
have lunch together. “Pedro and Rosa will come with me to the municipal building,”
says José as we are finishing. “We have to make sure all the paperwork for the soup
kitchen is in order. We’ll stop by Norma’s office. She’ll help us with the request we
made to the Secretaría de Emprendimientos Productivos. I want to know what’s going
on.” A month ago, José asked for eight sewing machines so that they could start
manufacturing (and then selling for a profit) school uniforms with material provided
by the federal state program Argentina Trabaja. I help clean the tables and stay in the
office while José and the others leave for the municipality.
Margarita, Melani, Susana, and Auyero spend the rest of the afternoon chatting about
the history of the settlement and of the nearby neighborhood—most of the squatters
used to live there, they say, which explains the fact that, as the school principal told one
of us earlier in the week, the number of students at the local school has not increased
even after roughly 1,500 squatters occupied the nearby flood-prone land. They tell
Auyero about their long lasting “friendship” with José, and about all the good things
he has done for the neighborhood and its residents.
Around 5 pm, José, Pedro, and Rosa return. They bring good news. The request has
been approved. The sewing machines will soon be ready for pick up at the municipal
storage facility. In less than two weeks, José and the rest are not only running a soup
kitchen, a workers’ cooperative, and the daily delivery of milk, they are also
manufacturing school uniforms. As I am about to leave, José—knowing about my
interest in the local political scene and clearly happy about his successful visit to the
municipal offices—tells me: “We work as a family, for the family and with the family.
. . . [After all we do] . . . votes will come, I don’t have to go and ask for votes . . . they
come by themselves.”
In poor and working-class neighborhoods, shantytowns, and squatter settlements, many

of the poor and unemployed solve the pressing problems of everyday life (e.g., access to jobs
and state welfare, food, and medicine) through patronage networks that rely on brokers
(locally known as punteros) as key actors (see Levitsky 2003; Szcwarberg 2010, 2015;
Zarazaga 2014). Depending on the (not always legal, not always overt) support of the local,
provincial, and national administrations, these problem-solving networks work as webs of
resource distribution and protection against the risks of everyday life. Punteros provide
“jobs, workfare programs, food, medicine, clothes, shoes, coffins, school materials, appli-
ances, bricks, zinc sheets, cash, marihuana and other illegal drugs” to their followers
(Zarazaga 2014:33).
Political scientist Steve Levitsky’s (2003) work on the transformation of the Peronist
party, the main political party in Argentina, provided an exhaustive first examination of the
party’s activities at the grassroots. Based on a survey of 112 UBs (Unidades Básicas, grass-
roots offices of the Peronist party), he showed that more than two-thirds of them engage in
direct distribution of food or medicine. Nearly a quarter of them regularly provide jobs for
their constituents. Sixty percent of the UBs of the Conurbano surveyed by Levitsky partici-
pate in the implementation of at least one government social program. Eleven years later,
sociologist Rodrigo Zarazaga (2014) conducted research on a similar sample of brokers and
found that “every broker regularly delivered particularistic favors.” Patronage politics, these
two studies show, is alive and well in contemporary Argentina.
The previous vignette captures well something that most studies of contemporary clien-
telism gloss over: In the daily workings of patronage, what matter most are not short-term
quid pro quo exchanges that take place before and during elections but diffuse, long-term
reciprocity, based on the embedding of brokers (and through them, patrons) in poor people’s
everyday lives during “normal” (i.e., non-electoral) times. True, before elections, brokers
campaign door to door, paint walls with candidates’ names, put up posters, and mobilize
participants for rallies. During elections, they either “buy” votes and/or turnout by the indi-
vidualized distribution of goods and services (Auyero 2000; Levitsky 2003; Nichter 2008;
Stokes 2005; Szwarcberg 2010, 2015; Weitz-Shapiro 2014). But electoral campaigning and
the personalized provision of resources in an attempt to obtain votes or support during elec-
tions are not the only actions brokers (and their patrons) carry out. As the aforementioned
story shows well, brokers do all sorts of other things, and they do so year-round, not exclu-
sively during campaigns. Brokers provide public goods and services (street lighting, garbage
collection trucks, bus shelters, etc.) for their neighborhoods. They run community soup
kitchens, health care centers, and sports centers (Ossona 2014; Zarazaga 2014). They coor-
dinate the delivery of state welfare programs. Brokers, in the words of Zarazaga (2014:27),
multitask and “help govern a municipality and deliver services on a day-to-day basis, not
just during elections.” Residents in turn count on them for the solution of daily problems
regularly present among the poor—from “speeding up” the waiting time at a state agency to
obtaining vital material goods (Auyero 2012).
The Inner Circle

To conduct this multitasking, brokers count on the assistance of an “inner circle” of follow-
ers. These hardcore followers are the brokers’ “personal satellites” to use Marshall Sahlins’s
(1977:222) apt expression. Brokers are related to the members of his or her inner circle
through strong ties (Granovetter 1973) of long-lasting friendship, parentage, and/or fictive
kinship (Auyero 2000). Interactions between brokers and their inner circles are typically
more intense and more regular than between brokers and his or her regular clients.
This inner circle is composed not only of the broker’s most loyal followers. As exempli-
fied in the opening story, the inner circle helps the broker solve the everyday problems of
clients: They run the soup kitchens, administer state welfare programs, and distribute the
information brokers obtain. They are normally in charge of opening, cleaning, and maintain-
ing brokers’ grassroots offices. They attend party meetings, paint campaign graffiti and
guard over painted walls, plaster (or destroy, if they belong to the opposition) posters, and
visit other voters door to door. At party rallies, they carry banners, play drums, and fight for
the most visible spots (so that patrons and brokers can see their followers). They are temp
workers at local municipalities and provide the workforce in state-funded cooperatives,
cleaning streets, parks, sidewalks, and bus stops. They may also act as regular enforcers for
patrons and brokers.3 Some of these functions point to the (also under-studied) fact that
members of the inner circle, in their face-to-face interactions with residents, act as brokers
by proxy in effect, representing the broker’s presence and power—handing out food, visiting
residents to pass along key information, inviting people to rallies, and so on.
The outer circle, namely, the large pool of potential beneficiaries of the brokers’ distribu-
tive capacities, are related to brokers through weak and disposable ties (Desmond 2012;
Granovetter 1973). They contact the broker, or members of his or her inner circle, when
problems arise or a special favor is needed (a food package, some medicine, a driver’s
license, the water truck, getting a friend out of jail, etc.), but they do not develop relation-
ships of friendship or fictive kinship with brokers. Although they may attend some of the
rallies or gatherings organized by the broker or even vote for him or her, they do not have an
everyday, close, intimate relationship with the broker. In other words, the broker’s ties to his
or her inner circle are dense and intense; the broker’s ties to the outer circle are sparse and
intermittently activated.
Clientelist networks work simultaneously as problem-solving and domination networks.
Weber’s (1968) classic notion of domination “by virtue of a position of monopoly” seems
almost purposely designed to understand the relationship between brokers and the outer
circle of followers. According to Weber (1968:943), this type of domination is “based upon
influence derived exclusively from the possession of goods or marketable skills guaranteed
in some way and acting upon the conduct of those dominated, who remain, however, for-
mally free and are motivated simply by the pursuit of their own interests.” Due to its monop-
olistic position in the capital market, any large banking or credit institution can impose its
own terms, in its own interests, for the granting of a credit, exercising in this way a “domi-
nating influence” on the capital market.
The potential debtors, if they really need the credit, must in their own interest submit
to these conditions and must even guarantee this submission by supplying collateral
security. The credit banks . . . simply pursue their own interests and realize them best
when the dominated persons, acting with formal freedom, rationally pursue their own
interests as they are forced upon them by objective circumstances [italics added].
(Weber 1968:943)
Under this type of domination, the dominant does not directly command the action of a
dominated group; in pursuing its own interests, the dominant (in this case, monopoly bank-
ers) has the capacity to constrain or narrow the possibilities open to the dominated (in this
case, people who need money).
Brokers hold a position similar to a large banking institution. Brokers pursue their own
political careers, trying to accumulate as much political power as they can and improve their
positions in the local political field (in the hopes of one day becoming a patron). To do so,
they gather (state) resources, and they hoard information vital to solving problems: They
become “problem solvers.” They do not directly command the actions of poor people who
need to solve pressing survival needs (what Weber would call “domination by virtue of
authority, i.e., power to command and duty to obey”).4 The domination that they exert over
the outer circle of clients can be explained in structural terms and by the existence of “brittle
and fleeting” ties, to use Desmond’s (2012) expression; linking brokers and their outer cir-
cles gives prima facie plausibility to arguments that describe clients’ behavior in terms of
rational calculations or reciprocity—if brokers fail to deliver, clients quit the relationship.
However, the domination brokers exert over their inner circles (and the reasons why clients
there behave the way they do) demands a different type of explanation, one more attentive
to the practical and symbolic dimension of this political arrangement to which we now turn.
Clientelism as a World of Practice

Once we expand the scope of clients’ actions beyond the acts of voting and attending cam-
paign rallies and we dissolve the rigid distinction between clients and brokers, we begin to
see that within the inner circle, clientelism is more than a one-time, spot-on, discrete action.
It instead has the features of a practice, namely, a regular, routinized behavior. Within this
world of practice, cognitive and affective schemes are hammered out in the flow of daily
events. Within this world of practice, neither rational choice nor normative models of cli-
ents’ actions can account for the unquestioned character that patronage takes there.
With José, we “began our friendship more than 12 years ago,” Rosa tells me.
He is so good. He always lends a hand. The medicine I’m now on . . . it is so expensive.

. . . I can’t afford it, and he helps me, he gets the medicine from the municipality . . . he
helps me a lot, and whatever is going on here [at the grassroots party office] he calls
me, because I collaborate with him, here.
Adela, part of another powerful broker’s inner circle, says, “I always show up at her office.
. . . I want to be thankful to her, she is a friend. They always call me, and I go.” Adela’s rea-
sons to be thankful abound: Both her daughter and husband got their part-time public jobs
thanks to the broker.
Relationships between brokers and their inner circles are practical relations, routinely
“practised, kept up, and cultivated” (Bourdieu 1977:38) not only through the distribution of
goods and favors but also through daily participation in the personalized solution of prob-
lems (organizing milk distribution, preparing food for the soup kitchen, arranging furniture
so that residents can eat, supervising sidewalk construction, etc.). As with most practical
knowledge (Desmond 2007; O’Connor 2005, 2006), knowledge about the “clientelist
exchanges” taking place inside the inner circle can be the subject of discursive articulation
only when explicitly requested. But, for the most part, it goes without saying. As two close
collaborators with brokers told Auyero:
I just know that I have to go with her [to a political rally] instead of with someone else.
Because she gave me medicine, or some milk, or a packet of yerba or sugar, I know
that I have to go to her.
Attending a rally is inside yourself. . . . It is like in the church, the church is the temple,
but we are the church. What happens if we do not go to the temple?
The daily, practical working of the network inscribes the relations of domination in the
hearts and minds of brokers’ closest followers in the form of dispositions—evidenced in the
innumerable manifestations of respect (“I think he [the broker] should be recognized for all
he is doing for the neighbors”), admiration (“[T]he way he takes care of people, he is an
exceptional human being”), and even friendship (“We consider ourselves her friend,” “She
is always present when something happens. . . . She is so good,” and “She pays attention to
every single detail”).
Specific affective schemes characterize inner circle members’ dispositions. Brokers are
seen as “sacrificing friends” who are always ready to help. Their actions are experienced as
“disinterested.”
The way he takes care of people, he is an exceptional human being. . . . He suffers,

because those who go there [the grassroots office] will never leave without a solution
to their problems. He has a solution for everyone. He willingly advises everyone.

Many people ask him for money . . . and he uses his own money.
He is always keen to serve. He likes to help people.
Inner circles are also characterized by specific cognitive dispositions about politics. Political
action is lived as everyday “personalized problem-solving.”
Politics helps a lot. . . . I improved my home through politics, I constructed all the
pipelines and the sewage system for my home through politics.
The street pavement was done through politics. When we need them [brokers] to get
drinking water, they are here.
Both cognitive and affective dispositions (the professed emotions, expressed commitments,
and declared loyalties) are nurtured in daily interactions of the kind portrayed in the opening
vignette. Brokers’ closest followers thus come to a rally or an election not as agents who
approach politics anew, not as players who begin a “game” afresh, but as actors who have
been practically prepared (that is, in a state of readiness, inclined, or disposed) for what
needs to be done.
As described previously, in both classic and more recent scholarly accounts, the under-
standing and explanation of clients’ behavior (Why do clients follow their brokers?) falls
neatly into two differentiated camps. One camp states that clients do what they do because
it is in their rational interest to do so. By following brokers’ and patrons’ commands, they
obtain the goods and services they need. Fearing brokers can actually monitor their (voting)
behavior, clients calculate costs and benefits and act accordingly. Another camp asserts that
clients behave the way they do because they feel an obligation toward the brokers and
patrons who helped them. Clients in these accounts follow not so much calculation but a
norm of reciprocity (an internalized prescription that comprises the source of the client’s
purposive conduct). In both perspectives, clients’ loyalty toward brokers and patrons is con-
tingent on the delivery of goods and services. If the flow is interrupted, clients, these accounts
lead us to predict, will abandon the relationship.
Long-term ethnographic fieldwork unearths a more complicated picture. It is certainly
true that as the scholarship on the subject shows repeatedly, when the balance of reciprocity
becomes too slanted, many clients question the relationship and eventually quit—they dis-
pose of their ties with the brokers. But the dynamic occurring within brokers’ inner circles is
different. Time and again, we saw how when the Josés, Pedros, and Margaritas of the clien-
telist world leave their brokers (Norma for José, José for Pedro, Margarita and the rest), they
look for another broker who is in a (structural) position to deliver. In other words, when a
broker or patron fails to provide, inner circle clients move on to another (more successful)
broker and patron. They dispose of the relationship with a broker, but they hold on to patron-
age as a way of solving daily problems. Because of the dispositions crafted and sustained
within inner circles, because of the operation of a “clientelist habitus,” patronage enjoys
legitimacy independent of the specific actors.5
This empirical reality does not deny the existence of cost-benefit calculations or reciproc-
ity norms. In some instances, rational calculations and norms do serve well to explain clients’
behavior. However, norms and calculations cannot account for the compliance toward clien-
telism as a form of doing politics at the grassroots level. Note what Victoria, one of the clients
interviewed by Zarazaga (2014:39), said about her broker and the alternative she entertains:
“[The broker] does not give me everything that I want, but he got me school uniforms for my
children and he always helps me out with food. If I go to somebody else [italics added] I might
well end up with less than that. He has my loyalty.” As expected by both rational action and
norm-based accounts, Victoria follows her broker because of the reputation for accessing and
delivering goods and services. But the alternative she has in mind (i.e., “going with someone
else,” that is, a different broker) points to the uncontested acceptance of clientelism (what
Bourdieu would call “doxa”) independent of the broker and patron. Note what José told
Auyero after a particular taxing day in which after many months of working with and for
Norma, she failed to deliver enough food for a rally he was organizing: “I don’t know . . .
lately, she’s not been good. I have to find someone who can always deliver.”
The acquiescence to clientelist domination by members of the inner circle gains special
theoretical and empirical relevance given the existence of Catholic charities, grassroots col-
lective organizations, and community associations as alternative modes of addressing press-
ing daily problems alongside clientelist networks. These are alternative problem-solving
ways in that they demand from those participating different (less personalized) types of
interactions with leaders and different (e.g., diverse time commitments) forms of (individual
or collective) engagement. For example, receiving aid from Caritas, a Catholic charity, does
not necessitate from the recipient an implicit reciprocal action (e.g., attendance of church
services). Different from party brokers, members of Caritas do not associate themselves with
the things given—namely, they do not personalize the assistance (Auyero 2000). Members
of collective organizations, on the contrary, do implicitly demand some kind of participation
in exchange for services or goods received, but the kind of commitment they solicit is not to
an individual (i.e., a broker) but to the organization itself (Perez forthcoming).
The fact that inner circle members hardly consider joining these alternative forms of
problem-solving organizations further attests to the strength and effectiveness of clientelist
domination. In other words, the doxic character of clientelism is not the outcome of it being
“the only game in town” but of the product of shared understandings learned in and through
daily interactions between clients and brokers.
Despite breakdowns in dyadic relationships, clients in the inner circle tend to remain
“loyal” to clientelism as a way of solving problems through personalized political mediation
because the everyday working of problem-solving networks infuses in members of the inner
circle a set of dispositions (and we emphasize the regular, routine operation of the network to
highlight that this relationship of exchange transcends singular acts of exchange). These dis-
positions lead inner circle clients to (1) perceive and evaluate politics in terms of its capacity
to, via personalized mediation, solve daily problems; (2) believe political action is an activity
conducted to support this or that broker; and (3) understand brokers as caring friends who are,
as Merton (1949:75) famously put it, “just one of us, who understand what it’s all about.”
Neither rational choice-based accounts nor those revolving around the norm of reciprocity
can explain this doxic character of clientelist practice learned through time and experienced
in everyday life as problem solving. To put it in slightly different terms, the authority that
specific patrons and brokers wield over their inner circles does come from the resources they
deliver, but the authority of clientelism as an informal institution is sustained by the disposi-
tions it instills among those who participate in the brokers’ inner circles. Clients and patrons
come and go, but clientelism has the extraordinary inertia it has because of the operation of a
clientelist habitus forged in and by brokers’ inner and—to a lesser extent—outer circles.6
The Clientelist Habitus and Dispositional Sociology

The paper presents multiple lessons for the study of political inequality and domination.
First, it explains reciprocity at a more constitutive level, as the de facto background for how
political action is organized. This happens via the production of schemata in which
reciprocity is the only way to organize political activity. Second, in doing so, it constitutes
clientelist politics as the horizon of intelligibility (the principle of vision and division) for
most social practices in the area (access to health, food, basic necessity goods, unemploy-
ment benefits, and even leisure), constituting a total social fact (Mauss [1916] 1979) in such
a way that even practices, events, relationships, and agents usually not studied under the
guise of patronage (i.e., the looting of supermarkets [Auyero 2008] or the relationship
between the formal and informal economies, like the illicit drug trade or counterfeit markets
[Dewey 2015]) are sucked into the vortex of long-term exchange practices and thus need to
be reconceptualized as part of this totalizing pattern. Third, it points to how in areas of
extreme deprivation what would be mostly studied as a secondary disposition—learned in
the specialized world of politics—actually gets transformed into a primary one. In the fol-
lowing paragraphs, we delve in depth on this point.
As a method for problem solving, clientelism, as we have just explained, pervades all
spheres of everyday life, linking very disparate activities, forcing us to think of the long-
term effects of this. Unlike other versions of what politics is (elected positions in political
parties, paid work at NGOs, volunteer work in a grassroots organization), which can very
well be thought of as secondary, specialized activities, clientelism in contrast becomes
ingrained in the fabric of life from the get-go in order, for instance, to be able to obtain an ID
for a baby, or registered in a program that guarantees the provision of powdered milk, or able
to participate in the cash transfer program for young mothers. So instead of a secondary kind
of disposition, we need to think of the clientelist disposition—in this particular social
world—as a primary one, constitutive of other social patterns. Bourdieu (2000) himself
alluded to situations of deprivation that dispose people to participate in the world in particu-
lar ways. In Pascalian Meditations he wrote:
We are disposed because we are exposed. It is because the body is (to unequal degrees)
exposed and endangered in the world, faced with the risk of emotion, lesion, suffering,
sometimes death, and therefore obliged to take the world seriously (and nothing is
more serious than emotion, which touches the depth of our organic being) that it is able
to acquire dispositions that are themselves an openness to the world, that is, to the very
structures of the world of which they are the incorporated form. (Pp. 140–41)
Far from the passive character usually ascribed to the client’s situation, this paper has shown
how agents actively participate in putting together a social arrangement under which estab-
lishing a relation of patronage still makes sense. In doing so, they help us to think through
one of the aporias of dispositional analysis: the question of what from the local or immediate
context activates or inhibits dispositions. In one of his often cited pieces, Bourdieu shows
the regressive character of what he deems the hysteresis effect (Bourdieu 1977). This effect
results in agents acting “as if” when they are still oriented by strategies better suited for a
previous situation. A lot has been made of “the fish out of water” effect and how it prohibits
agents from adapting to a new situation. But we have a case here in which the macro political
situation has changed (at least twice from when the first fieldwork was conducted in the mid-
1990s until the last ethnographic revisit in 2012), and yet little seems to have changed in
everyday political life. During the period of our study, the country went through three major
political shifts in terms of the party in command of the national government as well as seeing
two almost antithetical styles of dealing with poverty, one in which the social welfare net
shrank quickly over a relatively short period of time (1995–2002) and a second in which the
net was reextended (2003–2012). But if we were to look just at the social world we describe
here, all we would see is continuity. This has been true in our own work and the scholarly
literature on the topic that has documented the durable vitality of patronage networks among
the urban poor in Argentina for more than a decade (Levitsky 2003; Szwarcberg 2015;
Zarazaga 2014). How could this be explained from the realm of dispositional sociology?
Most studies of hysteresis have revealed a group of agents who continue to inhabit an
imaginary identification that has become disjointed from present-day symbolic realities
(Steinmetz 2008). Bourdieu (2008a) himself shows this in The Bachelor’s Ball where he
explicates how rural bachelors embody the contradictions between, on the one hand, the
local peasant single men’s rugged and clumsy bodies (they are “men of the woods”) and, on
the other, the demands they imagine of the single women whom they used to marry that have
now taken to other bodily styles and customs thanks to their employment in the service
economy of the cities surrounding Bearne. Two recent ethnographies of South Africa
(Decoteau 2013a, 2013b; Sallaz 2010) have thematized and explored the use of habitus as
“past-in-present” racial formation to make sense of the postcolonial situation in which blacks
and whites keep enacting practices in a highly differentiated way despite the end of legal
apartheid. In doing so, both authors invoke Bourdieu’s cleft habitus (Bourdieu 1999, 2008b):
Sallaz to explain the fatalism and despair of the white marketers in making sense of the dis-
juncture in which the power relations between whites and blacks have changed and Decoteau
to examine the hysteresis effect that results in agents still oriented by strategies better suited
for a previous situation.7
In this case, we conceptualize how previously available resources and knowledge are
mobilized to produce a new situation that adapts to the ways of acting dispositionally learned
under different conditions of acquisition. Unlike previous cases and studies that tend to
underscore the passivity of the client’s situation, this paper shows the active work that the
inner circle and clients put into a client-situation to make sure the world still operates under
the logic of practice they know and go by. While for Bourdieu one of the causes of disposi-
tional transformation is when the conditions of operation of the habitus are incongruent with
the conditions of its acquisition, and thus causing change or transformation as they become
“denaturalized,” suggesting then that a transformed environment should also result in an
eventual transformation of its representation, our paper emphasizes how those discrepancies
can instead be the source of social continuity instead of social change.
In advocating for how the hysteresis effect can be productive in generating enduring pat-
terns of action, we join other authors who have shown through the detailed ethnographic
study of other social worlds how this happens. Following Benzecry (2011), for instance, we
see how passionate fans at the opera house draw on a lost past to partially reproduce an atti-
tude toward opera born in that past but persisting through and in present-day action and
discourse. While the budget of the house had eroded and the famous international soloists
had stopped coming, amateurs kept talking about divos and divas, finding refuge in the iso-
lated upper floors of the house and reproducing the practices and performances of the fans
of the past as a way to reestablish the enjoyment denied by what was happening on stage.
Instead of finding an almost automatic adjustment between circumstances, disposition, and
practice, what we have learned from his empirical analysis is that community resources,
ingroup sociability, and isolation from competing interpretations are all key factors in medi-
ating the production of adjustment or discrepancy between resources and practice. In the
same vein, Auyero and Swistun (2009) studied the relationship between habitus and habitat,
observing the poisonous world of the Flammable shantytown and how people make sense of
their lead-loaded environment. They convincingly show how the perceptions of those
involved in the world are caused by a concerted “labor of confusion” by outside actors. In
anthropology, the work of Hirschkind (2001) shows how the demands of work and the geo-
graphical dispersion of Islamic practitioners did not result in an automatic transformation or
abandonment of the relationship between ethical discipline and Islamic argumentation.
Instead, he describes how the creation of a counter public in Egypt reveals how the actors,
thanks to the technology of sermons on cassettes and the group sociality produced by it,
actively make themselves blind to the transformations of the conditions under which those
ethical dispositions were supposed to operate.
All of these cases help us to expand on some of what we have found in our analysis, add-
ing an extra mediation to the relation between schemas and resources, which calls our atten-
tion to the role groups play in maintaining the productive and reproductive power of
dispositions.
Conclusions
The material and symbolic world of clientelism is not made up of the addition of a number
of one-on-one exchanges, tit-for-tat interactions that can be extracted (as “games” or norma-
tive models) from the course of everyday life. It is formed by a diffuse complex of material
and discursive practices that are continually reproduced in and through the daily operation
of the political machine. It exists in routine face-to-face (inter)actions. This study makes the
case for a dispositional account of political action via the observation of the taken-for-
granted, doxic character of patronage. In the daily world of clientelism, it matters less who
is the broker, the patron, or what exactly is being exchanged and more the way in which
clients are disposed to action via the establishment of long-term relations with their brokers.
The endurance of clientelist politics is thus better explained by observing the long-term
ontological complicity between the world in which agents within inner circles learn to
develop their schemes of perception and action and the practices in which those dispositions
are deployed.
The relationship that inner circles have with their brokers is not one between a political
subject and an external object. It is a relation of mutual “possession” (Bourdieu 2000) between
habitus—as structured structures of action, perception, and appreciation—and the political
world that determines it on a daily basis—not only nor mainly during elections. The structure
of clientelist networks and the cognitive and affective structures of clients are recursively
linked. This correspondence is the most effective support of political domination—neither
reciprocity nor calculative reason, but the symbolic schemes learned and deployed by the
dominated (i.e., the inner circle clients). A political sociology attentive to this symbolic aspect
of power is best equipped to capture the “imprecise, fuzzy, and wooly” (Bourdieu and
Wacquant 1992) character of clientelist politics—oftentimes straightjacketed in the seem-
ingly precise but usually misleading language of incentives, calculations, economic exchanges,
and the like that distorts to the point of disfigurement a complex and rich reality.
The study of habitus has been divided (Benzecry forthcoming) between scholars who
work on the idea of a primary habitus (exploring the long-term embodied acquisition of race,
class, gender, and its stratifying effects) or those who have studied the work of acquiring a
secondary habitus (the kind that informs the study of boxers, firefighters, opera-goers, glass-
blowers, trainers, or religious converts; Crossley 2004; Desmond 2007; O’Connor 2005,
2006; Wacquant 2004; Winchester 2008). Almost no attention has been paid to the produc-
tion of the political habitus (but see Mahler 2006 for an exception). The cognitive and affec-
tive dispositions manufactured inside specific political worlds (being those of party politics,
social movement politics, union politics, NGO politics, or state politics) provide an uncharted
(and we suspect fruitful) empirical terrain for political ethnographers. This paper has pro-
vided a preliminary sketch of what such an analysis looks like in the case of one curiously
persistent form of political action.
To fully understand and explain the operation of the clientelist habitus—the concept that
allowed us to reconstruct the logic of patronage—we now need to examine the sources of the
acquired dispositions by scrutinizing individual trajectories and the ways in which they con-
nect to the specific organizational logic of party politics (Desmond 2007; Wacquant 2004,
2007). If habitus is, as Bourdieu stresses, “internalized and forgotten history,” then the task
ahead is to unearth and scrutinize all that has been buried in both individuals and the political
organizations to which they belong.
At a larger level, this paper opens up the possibility for the study of the “black box” of
how politics are assembled on a daily basis, thus allowing for a detailed comparison with
other dispositional practices, learned along with others through long-term relationships, and
their effects on the reproduction of specific social universes.
Notes
1. Following recent trends in the literature, we use patronage and clientelism as synonyms. For evidence
of its endurance in Mexico, see also Holzner (2004) and Tosoni (2007); in Argentina, see (Brusco,
Nazareno and Stokes 2004) and Levitsky (2003); in Bolivia, see Lazar (2008); in Peru, see (Schneider
and Zúniga-Hamlin 2005); in India, see (Wilkinson 2007).
2. This usage appears clearly in his work on cultural structures and trajectories for self-distinction
(Bourdieu 1986), where the connections between subjective structures, the positions occupied in mul-
tiple social spaces, and the dispositions to act in them are highlighted.
3. Zarazaga (2014:31), for example, describes a broker’s “armed gang of followers” in this way:
[One] candidate for the local legislature . . . said that his faction paid a broker US$5000 to paint
graffiti after receiving guarantees that nobody would paint over them. The broker patrols the
street each night with an armed gang of followers, even signing his graffiti with his nickname
to warn off other brokers.
4. Domination in this sense means
the situation in which the manifested will (command) of the ruler or rulers is meant to influence
the conduct of one or more others (the ruled) and actually does influence it in such a way that
their conduct to a socially relevant degree occurs as if the ruled had made the content of the
command the maxim of their conduct for its very own sake. Looked upon from the other end,
this situation will be called obedience. (Weber 1968:943)
5. The members of inner and outer circles can in fact overlap. We are here focusing on types of relations,
not flesh-and-blood individuals. When brokers are in competition with one another (as described in
Auyero 2000), inner circles tend not to overlap. But when brokers are cooperating with each other,
members of the inner circle of one broker can be part of the outer circle of another, thus relying on
disposable ties with the second broker.
6. The schemes of perception, evaluation, and action that prevail inside the specific socio-symbolic uni-
verse of inner circles are in turn reconfirmed by the symbolic actions that patrons and brokers routinely
enact in their public speeches (emphasizing the “love” they feel for their followers and their “service
to the people”) and in their personalizing ways of giving that stress their efforts to obtain goods and
services (and thus creating the appearance that were they not there, the benefits would not be delivered)
(for a dissection of brokers’ public performances, see Auyero 2000).
7. Steinmetz (2006, 2013) has called attention to the fact that in Bourdieu’s work the combination of
the particular situation that the agent confronts, with the particular dispositions she carries, and the
constraints that the past and collective forces affect on her can be found under three main forms: inte-
grated, disjunctural, and split. The first iteration of the multiple modalities appears in The Weight of the
World (Bourdieu 1999), the second in his Sketch for Self Analysis (Bourdieu 2008b).
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Author Biographies
Javier Auyero is the Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Professor in Latin American Sociology at the
University of Texas-Austin and director of the Urban Ethnography Lab. He is the author of Poor People’s
Politics, Contentious Lives, Routine Politics and Violence in Argentina, and Patients of the State. Together
with Débora Swistun, he co-authored Flammable: Environmental Suffering in an Argentine Shantytown,
and with María Fernanda Berti, he co-authored In Harm’s Way: The Dynamics of Urban Violence. He is
also the editor of Invisible City: Life and Labor in Austin, Texas and co-editor, with Philippe Bourgois and
Nancy Scheper-Hughes, of Violence at the Urban Margins.
Claudio E. Benzecry is associate professor of communication and sociology (courtesy) at Northwestern
University. He’s the author of the multi-awarded The Opera Fanatic: Ethnography of an Obsession. He’s
the co-editor, ith Monika Krause and Isaac Reed, of Social Theory Now. He’s currently finishing a manu-
script about globalization, creativity, and the invisible labor of coordination tentatively called The Global
Shoe: The Work of Creativity across Borders.

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725767

The Practical Logic of

Political Domination: st.sagepub.com

Javier Auyero1 and Claudio Benzecry2

1University of Texas, Austin, TX, USA

From Everyday Life to Electoral Times

Methods and Sites

Habitus, Doxa, and Social Reproduction

Problem solving and Domination Networks

In poor and working-class neighborhoods, shantytowns, and squatter settlements, many

The Inner Circle

Clientelism as a World of Practice

He is so good. He always lends a hand. The medicine I’m now on . . . it is so expensive.

The way he takes care of people, he is an exceptional human being. . . . He suffers,

to their problems. He has a solution for everyone. He willingly advises everyone.

He is always keen to serve. He likes to help people.

The Clientelist Habitus and Dispositional Sociology

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