In early prewar modernization period of Japan, party patronage was used to control the entrenched elite bureaucracy. Patronage was used to anchor the democratic representation of the national government officials who were given their own legitimacy. After Japan was defeated in World War II, Japan was institutionally fully liberalized and democratized. However, the reform of the old political regime was implemented through the Japanese bureaucracy. This fact demonstrates that the bureaucracy maintained substantial influence over the national policy-making process during post-war period. As the Liberal Democratic Party members accumulated policy-making capacities in certain economic fields, clientelism and particularism became key features of Japanese politics. But it did not particularly involve patronage appointments. It was rather connected with other “porks” such as economic benefits to the electoral consistency. As a result, from a comparative perspective, patronage practice in Japanese politics may be rather limited in its scope and depth, compared with other democracies in Asia.

The public interest-based discourse of state legitimation continued to serve as a common normative platform for state–society interactions when each state's capacity was greatly enhanced under new socioeconomic circumstances in England (1640–1780), Japan (1853–1895), and China (1840–1911). The state–society interactions over domestic public goods provision were politically similar to those in the earlier episodes, though the scale and organizational capacity of social actors became much greater. Petitions to the state to redress specific welfare grievances did not escalate into demands for political reforms. In contrast, issues of nonmaterial public good, such as "true Christianity" in England and "national honor" in Japan, as well as the ensuing tension between the international and domestic dimensions of public interest, mobilized large-scale cross-regional and cross-sectoral petitions of public grievance. These petitions demanded fundamental political reforms in England and Japan. In China before 1895, the lack of conflict between diverse dimensions of the public interest accounts for the absence of such petitions of public grievance. When that changed, China likewise saw petitions for political change prior to the collapse of the Qing in 1911.

Extant literature on Chinese elite politics tend to argue that Chinese officials work under a political system very different from a western-Weberian bureaucracy. Factional patron-client relationship is considered a dominant factor affecting political appointment of high-level officials. However, prior findings have been mainly based on governors of provincial or prefectural jurisdictions or central committee members. State Council ministers and vice-ministers are largely missing in the previous analysis. Our research examines State Council ministers and vice-ministers under the administration of President Xi Jinping. This high-level bureaucrat group arguably is most comparable to the political appointees in Weberian bureaucracies. We systematically analyze their types of patronage along the policy-politics divide and loyalty basis. We also bring in the dimension of expertise to further identify the extent of professionalization of Chinese ministers. We find a variety of patronage existing among Chinese ministers. Political loyalty is only one kind of the patronage affecting personnel configurations of the State Council.

Chapter 5 illustrates how demand responds to changes in the forces on which it depends. Using the theory of consumer behavior, we start out by explaining the concepts of price, income, and cross-price elasticity of demand, as well as how to derive these elasticities. We will also cover empirical evidence on the actual value of the price and income elasticities of demand for the live performing arts in several countries over several different time periods.

In this chapter Innes explores how Soviet economics, and the neoclassical economics behind British neoliberalism, came to conceive of the political economy as a closed system, governed by predetermined economic laws and dependable behaviours. Both orthodoxies are shown to depend on arguments about the universal truths of the political economy that are not just utopian, but tautological - circular - in their reasoning. Their axiomatic assumptions and actions are valid, as distinct from true, by virtue only of their logical formulation, and their end goals are consequently as impossible to realise as they are to refute. By exploring the evolution of both Soviet and neoclassical economic thought, Innes outlines the affinities between the ‘social physics’ of neoclassical economics and the deterministic assumptions of Stalinist central planning, and explains why it is that even the relatively critical, ‘second best world’ neoclassical economics that became associated with New Labour policy is freighted with no less determinism than the ‘first best world’ assumptions adopted by the New, neoliberal right.

This chapter provides insights into how the arts labor market works. We seek to understand what motivates artists to pursue their chosen professions and discuss whether the concept of the “starving artist” is valid. Using an artist survey, we explore the stated opinions of an artist to describe who can be classified as a professional artist. We shed light on the labor market of artists by investigating the role of unions, the “superstar” phenomenon, and the decision problem of an artist using the human capital model. Finally, we discuss gender representation in the labor market as well as the gig labor market.

This chapter lies the microeconomic foundation to understand consumer demand in the cultural sector. We start out by outlining the assumptions that underlie the economic analysis of consumer choice, followed by a breakdown of how to measure the utility of the consumer, as well as how the consumer maximizes utility. We also show how to derive demand and supply curves which are essential to analyze the market powers at play in the cultural sector. Finally, we will show how to use the market demand and supply curves to determine the market price.

In this chapter, we examine and analyze private support for the arts, mostly in the form of household, corporate, foundation, and other donations. In addition to this, we also explore the role of “indirect” government support in the form of tax forgiveness for private donors. We compare arts support across countries and explain the vastly different levels of private support. Additionally, we discuss the concept of nonmonetary private donations, often in the form of works of art. Finally, we outline the advantages and disadvantages of private and/or public support.

The chapter examines what gets lost analytically when governments move from thinking empirically about complex interdependent systems to relying instead on decision-making models that assume an unchanging mode of human rationality and fixed economic laws. Having set out the neoclassical theory behind outsourcing, privatisation and agencification, the chapter investigates how these policies have played out in practice. It demonstrates that although more critical i.e. ‘second best world’ neoclassical economic theories help us understand the chronic contractual, regulatory and oversight problems that prevail at the microeconomic level, it is the lessons of Soviet enterprise planning that tell us more about the systemic failures of these policies. Soviet planning failures illuminate why these reforms induce bargaining games between firms and ‘firm-like’ state agencies that the state cannot win, and why government attempts to solve chronic policy failures with remedial regulations that conform to orthodoxy create an ever more rigid bureaucracy over time, and in the case of outsourcing, increasingly informal relations prone to corruption, exactly as they did in the USSR.

In this chapter, we investigate the economic choices – especially the price-output choices – made by performing arts firms. We cover the factors that help in determining the optimal price–output combination for performing arts firms. Furthermore, we discuss a multitude of market types and how these market types influence the behavior of performing arts firms. We also present the objectives of the performing arts firms, which depend on whether they are in the commercial or the not-for-profit sector of the economy. Ultimately, we end up with a model for the performing arts firm that is able to predict both ticket prices and length of season.

This chapter sets out the dystopian critique of the liberal democratic state that emerged when neoclassical economic reasoning was applied to the political realm. The resulting ‘public choice theory’ made assertive claims of democratic state failure that became a mainstay of neoliberal argument, but here they are shown to possess clear affinities with the Leninist account of bureaucracy as the ‘real’ centre of power in a bourgeois democracy. It follows from the deterministic, closed-system reasoning in both Leninist and neoclassical 'public choice' theory that these affinities continued into the respective prescriptions for the preferred constitutional order. The ideal constitution of limited government set out in public choice theory, most notably by James Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and Geoffrey Brennan is shown to be a logically inevitable counterpart to the ‘withering away of the state’ under socialism anticipated by Lenin. The adjacent constitutional arguments of Friedrich August von Hayek are also considered, as is the more empirically robust account of bureuacracy as an essential feature of modernity set out by Max Weber.

Who engages with art? This chapter outlines methods for art companies to gain a better understanding of the socioeconomic background of their audience. We also present a cross-country comparison on participation rates in the arts to illustrate the patterns of cultural consumption around the world. To get a better understanding of the audience characteristics, this chapter also summarizes the findings of several participation studies on the socioeconomic characteristics of art attenders across countries and over time.