Why Political Competition Can Increase Patronage

Patronage is important in developing countries, but its relationship to political competition has received little attention. Major literatures generate opposing predictions. In the good governance and democracy literatures, robust political competition is the antidote to patronage. But for scholars studying the process of democratization, competitive politics is associated with heightened social tensions and instability. Using data from an original survey covering 88% of local governments in Ghana, I show that political competition can increase patronage: where local elections are closely fought by the two main parties, local governments provide significantly more public sector jobs. I use qualitative data from 9 months of fieldwork to show the causal channel. I find a bottom-up phenomenon in which pressures for patronage come from parties’ own volunteers. Volunteers actively use their parties’ vulnerability in competitive elections to extract rewards. I locate the root of volunteers’ power in the nature of the party system, and I demonstrate that for 19 African countries, variation in party system strength is linked to certain forms of clientelism. These findings challenge assumptions that competitive politics will reduce patronage, as well as assumptions that a decline in one form of clientelism means a decline in all forms of clientelism.     

Patronage,District Creation,and Reform in Uganda

The effects of economic and political reforms on patronage in Africa remains unclear. In particular, there is much disagreement about whether structural adjustment programs and democratization have helped to make patronage less pervasive in African politics. Here, I examine the case study of Uganda, which has received much praise for its large-scale economic and political reforms since the late 1980s. However, at the same time, Uganda has also experienced a near-explosion in the number of districts (the highest level of local government), going from 39 to 80 in less than a decade. I examine a variety of potential reasons why these districts might have been created and argue, through the use of both qualitative and quantitative analysis, that district creation has functioned as a source of patronage. Specifically, I show that President Museveni’s government has created new districts as a means to compensate for other patronage resources lost through reforms and that new districts have helped him to continue to win elections. This paper thus constitutes the first rigorous demonstration that the creation of new sub-national political units can constitute a form of patronage and suggests that similar processes may be currently taking place across Africa.     

Abkhazia: Patronage and Power in the Stalin Era

Abkhazia during the Stalin era was at the same time a subtropical haven where the great leader and his lieutenants built grand dachas and took extended holidays away from Moscow, and also a key piece in the continuing chess match of Soviet politics. This paper will examine how and why this small, sunny autonomous republic on the Black Sea, and the political networks that developed there, played a prominent role in the politics of the south Caucasus region and in Soviet politics as a whole during the Stalin period.     

Patronage,Service Delivery,and Social Justice in Indonesia

This article examines how patronage networks operate in subnational governments in Indonesia paying particular attention to how they have affected human resource management (HRM) practices in education and health services. Corrupt practices were found in varying degrees in all the provincial public services studied. They were associated with patronage systems and involved illegal payments for entrance exam results, recruitment and selection, placement, promotion, and transfer. These practices had an adverse effect on the quantity and quality of service delivery and represented a challenge to social justice.

This article is related to the special issue “Contemporary Challenges for Public Sector Human Resource Management” of the International Journal of Public Administration, Volume 35, Issue 8, 2012.     

Interlinked contracts and social power: Patronage and exploitation in India's waste recovery market

Interlinked contracts have been examined almost exclusively in the context of the rural sphere. This article describes the nature of exchange regimes between two sets of primary collectors of recyclable waste, that is, waste pickers and itinerant buyers, and their dealers, in the city of Delhi. Far from the casualised labour transaction commonly described for the unorganised urban sector, the findings portray a picture of personalised and surprisingly long-term exchange between the parties. While a new institutional economics approach might explain the underlying motivation and consequent general form of the implicit contracts, it cannot explain the differential nature of each. It is suggested that in order to do that a political economy approach must be taken. This would understand interlinked transactions as being embedded within and consequently influenced by the particular social context, in this case of an inequitable and impermeable caste hierarchy amongst those that engage in waste work.     

Wheels within Wheels: Poverty,Power and Patronage in the Cambodian Migration System

Abstract

This article presents evidence for an adjusted and refocused systems theory of labour migration in Cambodia. Specifically, it seeks to highlight first, how migration in Cambodia may be understood as a multi-scalar phenomenon characterised by pragmatism and flexibility; secondly, it emphasises the undergirding role of traditional rural norms in shaping and mediating the systematic process of labour movement; and finally, it presents evidence concerning how these structures constitute a vessel of social change, not only from urban to rural, but also from the rural to urban. In this way, a picture is presented of Cambodian migration as an adaptable, but nevertheless highly patterned process which is rapidly reordering the Kingdom’s cities and villages alike.     

Patronage,politics and performance: radio call-in programmes and the myth of accountability

The role of media in promoting political accountability and citizen participation is a central issue in governance debates. Drawing on research into the interactions between radio station owners, journalists, audiences and public authorities during Somali radio call-in programmes we argue that these programmes do not simply offer a new platform for citizens to challenge those who are governing but that they are also spaces where existing power structures reproduce themselves in new forms. We identify the ways the programmes are structured and the different motivations the audience has for participation. Three types of programmes are identified and their relationships with patronage, politics, and performance are examined. Rather than focusing on normative assumptions about the media as a tool of accountability, the article emphasises the importance of understanding radio programmes in their social and political environment, including the overlapping relationships between on-air and off-air networks.     

Market,Freedom and the Illusions of Microcredit. Patronage,Caste, Class and Patriarchy in Rural South India

Abstract

As a market tool, microcredit is expected to promote individual freedom, for women in particular. By drawing on a southern Indian case, this paper argues that microcredit is in fact shaped by the power structures it is supposed to eradicate. Even if they are partly reshaped, local structures of power remain unavoidable to protect populations (something that microcredit fails to do) but also to build the microcredit market and ensure its legitimacy, for donors, local political arenas and local populations. Far beyond microcredit, our findings question the uneasy relationships between markets and individual freedoms.     

From a discipline without a subject to a subject without a discipline.

This article suggests an approach to the classical issues of the public administration theory, through the so-called new institutionalism. It argues that public policies could be taken by public administration theory as a new object of study, which this theory has gradually lost in the past. Nevertheless, whether the policy sciences can be useful1 or not to develop public administration as a discipline depends on the theoretical bridge offered by the new institutional approach. To propose how and why is the main objective of this article, based on the Mexican academic debate.