PERSPECTIVE article
Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Political Economy
Volume 7 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2025.1490245
Clientelism, Public Goods, and Divided Democracies: A Methodological Critique
Provisionally accepted
- 1University of Caldas, Manizales, Colombia
- 2Militar University of New Granada, Bogotá, Cundinamarca, Colombia
- 3ICESI University, Cali, Cauca, Colombia
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As social scientists, we find Soumyanetra Munshi's article, "Clientelism or public goods: dilemma in a divided democracy", both fascinating and thought-provoking. However, we would like to comment on two issues that we have detected in her theoretical model. Our dialogue is guided in the logic of Rubinstein (2006) where one of the most important functions of a formal model is to generate conclusions. Some of these conclusions might be absurd even though departing from sound assumptions, and an absurd conclusion is as important as the contradiction of a mathematical model itself. In this short paper we debate Munshi's paper in terms of an absurd conclusion first, and a logical contradiction later.
Keywords: Divided democracies, Probabilistic Vote, Inequaility, Game theory, Clientelism and patronage, Economic methodology and thought
Received: 02 Sep 2024; Accepted: 19 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Cendales, Guerrero and Mora. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Andrés Cendales, University of Caldas, Manizales, Colombia
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