This framework chapter for the edited collection begins with a definition of political patronage adopted from existing research: the power of political actors to appoint individuals, using their own discretion, to non-elective positions in the public sector, irrespective of the legality of the decision. These individuals tend to be directly involved in making public policy. The book is about patronage appointments in bureaucracies in Asian countries, some with well-developed civil service systems and minimal patronage, some with high levels of patronage and a weak civil service, and others between these extremes. The framework chapter develops a typology of patronage types based on two primary criteria: basis of trust (political or personal loyalty to: the political party, politician, or a group); and, the major role of political appointees (the extent to which they influence public policy). Each of the countries in the edited collection tests the appropriateness of this typology for individual Asian case studies illustrating the fact that not all patronage is the same and what is important is the tasks being performed by appointees and the nature of the trust relationship.

The proclaimed duty of the state to safeguard the public interest provided a space for subordinates to engage with ruling authorities. It entailed the right of the ruled to remind the state to fulfill its obligation in the case of specific welfare grievances of its subjects. Such a right was passive, as it was derived from the state's duty to protect the public interest. The patterns of state response to popular claim-making were similar across Tudor and early Stuart England, Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China. The right to petition authorities was granted to individuals; yet the state did not allow crowd petitions, which were universally treated as disrespectful to authority and as a threat to social order. However, the state across these three cases was tolerant of collective petitions caused by cross-regional or cross-sectoral conflicts of interest, and it tried to arbitrate disputes as an impartial guardian of the public interest. The increasing scale of conflicts of interest that arose with population growth and commercialization led to larger-scale and well-organized popular petitions that were still accepted by the state. Such petitioning represented a political space that had great potential to expand with socioeconomic development.

At the bureaucratic level, Indias administration and policymaking are largely controlled by members of the elite Indian Administrative Service (IAS). Their initial recruitment is on merit and considered fair, and therefore the best brains in the country join the Service at a young age. However, despite their individual competence, IAS officers, who occupy almost all senior administrative positions in the States and Centre, have not been able to improve development outcomes for common citizens. This is largely due to the fact that the political culture in India, at the states level and now since 2014 also at the Central level, is patronage based, and politicians control the civil service to buttress their private gains and ideological goals. This chapter will describe in detail the interface between bureaucrats and politicians, and the methods employed by politicians to manipulate and politicise the civil service. The paper will also describe how politicisation of the senior civil servants has engulfed the entire system after Mr Modi took over as Prime Minister in 2014.

The prologue to Part II synthesizes the major causes of the resilience of early modern states despite their limited capacities. It explores the conditions that led to the collapse of state–society collaboration in pursuit of good governance. Big historical events – the English Civil War, the Meiji Restoration, and the Taiping Rebellion – forced the state in each case to search for new institutions to safeguard various dimensions of the public interest in the new socioeconomic circumstances and so reestablish its legitimacy.

This chapter uses Taiwan’s case to address the following questions: What context constitutes the practice of patronage in Taiwan? What are the strategies for patronage appointments? With literature review, secondary resources, and in-depth interview data, the authors indicate that Taiwans patronage appointments are highly tangled with the history of democratization and a solid civil service system. Therefore, the elements of loyalty and expertise coexist in the practice of Taiwans patronage appointments. In addition, the authors also embed Taiwans case into the unified framework of patronage appointments, analyzing the observed types of patronage and potential explanatory factors. This chapter could provide useful insights for further comparative research when it comes to exploring the differences and similarities between Asian countries political patronage issues.

This chapter examines famine and poverty relief in Tudor and early Stuart England, Tokugawa Japan, and Qing China. Relief in subsistence crisis was the most basic obligation of the state to the public interest. The same platform of a public interest-based discourse of state legitimation led to two different directions in state–society interactions in famine relief. Tudor and early Stuart England and Tokugawa Japan had decentralized fiscal systems, and municipal and rural granaries managed by local authorities and social elites were dominant. Yet when a major subsistence crisis occurred, the royal government and shogunate as the highest political authority in each realm had to intervene to protect the welfare of wider regions or even the entire country. In contrast, the Qing state in China had a centrally managed fiscal system that played a significant role in transferring funds and grain across regions in times of major subsistence crisis. The technical difficulties in managing state granaries across the country, however, led the Qing state to encourage local elites' participation in building and managing nonofficial granaries to benefit local inhabitants and to make up for the inadequacies of the state system.

This chapter provides a brief account of political appointments in the South Korean government, with a particular attention to presidential appointments. We also demonstrate why appointments of cabinet ministers warrant further scholarly attention. Then, we assess presidential appointments of ministers in an empirical manner. In the analytical section of the chapter, we first describe in detail how we have constructed a novel dataset. In presenting the analysis results, we first describe major demographic characteristics of the country’s past cabinet ministers and illustrate their major career paths prior to their ministerial appointments. We also categorize the past appointments into the six types of political patronage per Peters’ typology. Our findings reveal that, in South Korea, programmatic technocrats are the dominant group of presidential appointees regardless of regime and ministry. Among those programmatic technocrats, nearly half are former bureaucrats. Our findings also suggest that, while the vast majority of the South Korean ministers are programmatic technocrats, there are some notable differences across regimes and ministries.

The chapter deals with three distinct yet interrelated public administration issues in the context of Bangladesh: patronage, civil service politicization, and the ordeals of politicization on individual civil servants. The patronage and politicization are deep-rooted in the governance and political trajectory of the country. Most key actors, politicians, bureaucracy, and business elites, are the beneficiaries of this politicized and patronage system. This chapter argues that the account of professional civil servants ordeal can contribute to the existing literature on public administration. The most perturbing issue is that the current governance trajectory in Bangladesh seeks to continually benefit from this politicized bureaucracy by establishing a monopoly over it. Therefore, it does not seem that the situation will change soon. However, as we know, nothing can stay static; thus, the silver line may emerge from the dialogues between stakeholders who want to see improved governance and professionalism in the bureaucracy. The author of this paper looks to the conscientious politicians, public opinion builders, and professional civil servants to break this vicious cycle.

Singapore’s civil service has been lauded as one of the successful case studies globally. The emphasis on meritocracy has been the hallmark of Singapore’s governance. This principle remains a guiding philosophy for the dominant People’s Action Party (PAP). Political analysts often attributed “the Singapore miracle” to its corruption-free, highly professional, technocratic government. Still, certain segments of Singapore’s civil service bear the institutional and cultural vestiges of politically motivated appointments. In this chapter, we first analyze the process of selecting top public service positions, showing how political considerations are factored into these appointments. Second, using the case of the People’s Association, we explore the “public service” face of para-political organizations and demonstrate how appointments and politics of urban governance are intertwined. The chapter offers us insights on how political interests and concerns persist despite the progress in public governance, and on the role of elite networks and political regime-making in shaping public sector opportunities.

Patronage is a broad concept that can be used to describe such practices as clientelism and corruption. More specifically, this chapter considers party patronage where political parties ‘appoint individuals to (non-elective) positions in the public and semi-public sector’ (Kopecký et al, 2016). The research builds on the widening global database that measures the scope and depth of party patronage by examining public sector appointments in Central Asian countries. Of specific interest is why authoritarian states engage in patronage appointment practices when the dominant parties are already inextricably linked to the political elite. The study uses Kazakhstan as the site of enquiry and, through proxy indicators, extends the geography to consider Central Asia as a whole. We find the scope and depth of party patronage crosses all key policy sectors and reaches from the top to the lower tiers of governance. Looking at the trends for Central Asian countries since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, party patronage shows no signs of abating.