Kinship salience varies according to patterns of access to vital limited resources. At the end of state building, it determines the means of access to power and resources in a state and can compel behaviour by members of those groups. Kinship authority can have either governing salience as in the case of Kuwait and Qatar, or instrumentalised salience as in the case of Oman. The differentiation between the governing and instrumentalised political salience of kinship authority is based on kinship authority's (1) relationship with the state and (2) its ability to compel action by kinship group members. When vital resource access is competitive before state building, kinship authority will have governing salience. In such cases, kinship groups use bureaucracy as a source of resources and access to power, marginalising the bureaucracy's ability to exert bureaucratic authority. When vital resource access is cooperative, kinship authority will have instrumentalised salience. The state in such cases co-opts kinship authority, using kinship networks as a means of patronage distribution and marginalising kinship groups as governing entities.

Salience is a way of conceptualising the political effects of kinship authority as a dependent variable. Despite its frequent usage among political scientists, it can be a difficult term to define and prone to conceptual stretching. In political science, the concept appeared originally in survey research on voter preferences. However, even for such studies the term was fraught with ambiguity. It referred to where voters place an issue on a ranked list, but could account neither for changes over time, nor the possibility that voters do not literally hold fixed ranked preferences in their minds. Generally, salience seems to connote that something is ‘important’ in a particularly prominent way. Yet while both ‘importance’ and ‘prominence’ are components of salience, Wlezian notes that ‘prominence is not completely orthogonal to importance; it is different’. For the purposes of this book, salience refers to the extent that kinship authority matters in some politically relevant sense. It is important, but in a particular way that is observable to individuals and institutions within a society. To be useful for political science, however, discussions of salience require us to understand what salience, both governing and instrumentalised, looks like in an empirical context.

This chapter clarifies, defines and operationalises the concept of kinship salience. It provides explanations for differentiating clearly between governing and instrumentalised salience.