Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- List of contributors
- 1 Citizen–politician linkages: an introduction
- 2 Meet the new boss, same as the old boss? The evolution of political clientelism in Africa
- 3 Monopoly and monitoring: an approach to political clientelism
- 4 Counting heads: a theory of voter and elite behavior in patronage democracies
- 5 Explaining changing patterns of party–voter linkages in India
- 6 Politics in the middle: mediating relationships between the citizens and the state in rural North India
- 7 Rethinking economics and institutions: the voter's dilemma and democratic accountability
- 8 Clientelism and portfolio diversification: a model of electoral investment with applications to Mexico
- 9 From populism to clientelism? The transformation of labor-based party linkages in Latin America
- 10 Correlates of clientelism: political economy, politicized ethnicity, and post-communist transition
- 11 Political institutions and linkage strategies
- 12 Clientelism in Japan: the importance and limits of institutional explanations
- 13 The demise of clientelism in affluent capitalist democracies
- 14 A research agenda for the study of citizen–politician linkages and democratic accountability
- References
- Index
2 - Meet the new boss, same as the old boss? The evolution of political clientelism in Africa
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- List of contributors
- 1 Citizen–politician linkages: an introduction
- 2 Meet the new boss, same as the old boss? The evolution of political clientelism in Africa
- 3 Monopoly and monitoring: an approach to political clientelism
- 4 Counting heads: a theory of voter and elite behavior in patronage democracies
- 5 Explaining changing patterns of party–voter linkages in India
- 6 Politics in the middle: mediating relationships between the citizens and the state in rural North India
- 7 Rethinking economics and institutions: the voter's dilemma and democratic accountability
- 8 Clientelism and portfolio diversification: a model of electoral investment with applications to Mexico
- 9 From populism to clientelism? The transformation of labor-based party linkages in Latin America
- 10 Correlates of clientelism: political economy, politicized ethnicity, and post-communist transition
- 11 Political institutions and linkage strategies
- 12 Clientelism in Japan: the importance and limits of institutional explanations
- 13 The demise of clientelism in affluent capitalist democracies
- 14 A research agenda for the study of citizen–politician linkages and democratic accountability
- References
- Index
Summary
Clientelism exists in all polities. The forms it takes, its extent, and its political functions vary enormously, however, across time and place. This chapter analyzes the persistence and evolution of political clientelism in sub-Saharan Africa since independence. Pervasive clientelism was a hallmark of the region's non-democratic states until their transition to multiparty politics in the 1990s. To what extent will these practices persist, now that democratic politics, however imperfect, has become the norm in the region? The second half of this chapter examines the likely evolution of political clientelism in the new multiparty electoral regimes of sub-Saharan Africa.
A comparison of this region with the regions examined by the other contributions to this book confirms an argument made by Kitschelt and Wilkinson in their introduction, that the structural characteristics of the country determine the nature of the clientelistic politics. The African cases discussed in this chapter have a lower level of economic development and smaller, poorer state structures than those discussed in the other chapters. This impacts the nature of clientelism in the region. The rest of this book uses the terms patronage and clientelism interchangeably, perhaps because most of the case material comes from middle-income countries with relatively wealthy states and extensive experience of electoral politics. It is important to note that in sub-Saharan Africa a pervasive form of elite clientelism, prebendalism, actually involves relatively little patronage.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Patrons, Clients and PoliciesPatterns of Democratic Accountability and Political Competition, pp. 50 - 67Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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