Mobilizing support through an organization known as the Farmers' Alliance, the Populist movement of the late 19th century sought to bring together producers throughout the agrarian periphery in an effort to remedy abuses associated with the marketing of commercial crops. Combining innovations in network analysis with new data on the location of market infrastructure and social movement organizations, I examine the relationship between market position and the propensity for Alliance activity.

Although they figure prominently in the economies of the rich democracies, consumers have received strikingly little attention in the comparative political economy literature. Among its rich peers, the United States stands out as the quintessential consumer society. Those studies that address America’s distinctively consumption-oriented political economy mostly attribute this outcome to the actions of the government in the 1930s to stimulate home ownership (and associated mortgage debt) in response to the Great Depression.

Despite a large comparative literature on party machines in distributive politics, scholars have yet to systematically examine how party leaders select local brokers to staff their party organizations. We provide a theoretical framework for studying these selection decisions. We argue that patrons must balance two key concerns: a broker’s efficacy among clients and their loyalty to party and patron. We test the relative importance of these concerns through a conjoint experiment conducted with 343 local political patrons across two Indian cities.