Do the public support personal intervention by politicians to facilitate access to public services? Does contingency, the defining characteristic of clientelism, matter? We utilize survey vignettes to test Indonesian voter reactions to three political strategies for service delivery: the impartial monitoring of the bureaucracy, personal intervention to help individuals access services, and clientelistic personal intervention that only assists supporters. We find that impartially working to monitor the civil service increases vote likelihood substantially more than other strategies, while clientelistically assisting supporters generates no further electoral costs compared to non-clientelist personal intervention. We argue that social embeddedness crucially shapes which groups drive the average effect by changing the perceived value of personal exchange. Only those who report high social density in their communities (high horizontal embeddedness) or those who do not approach politicians or bureaucrats for help (low vertical embeddedness) find impartial monitoring more appealing, and these groups constitute a majority. Finally, we establish that service delivery clientelism is seen as distinct from vote buying, which has important implications for clientelism research. The results challenge many accounts, including the beliefs of politicians, on the transactional character of Indonesian politics, and provides new evidence for the centrality of social relationships in shaping the perceived value of clientelism.