Clientelism

The Clientelism of Notables

At least initially, the introduction of elections reinforced the power of notables. In the French Third Republic, aristocrats, bourgeois landowners, or industrialists won political office by using their wealth and social standing as means of enhancing their electoral chances. Until the mid-twentieth century, the same phenomenon was commonplace in the peasant communities of southern Europe and for agrarian elites in numerous developing countries. Voting simply [Page 96]reinforced social hierarchies. Votes were also “exchanged” for services that could be offered to loyal followers (land, employment, charitable donations, etc.). Democratization thus led to the formation of clientelistic networks that then became the notables' first political parties.

When mass parties came into being, these notables had to compete with new political entrepreneurs from the middle classes, the professions, or the trades unions. These professional politicians had no patrimony that could be converted into clientelistic resources. Instead, they sought electoral support through spreading the idea that voting and political affiliation should stem from the sharing of convictions, ideology, and the defense of collective interests. To these politicians, the self-interest-driven exchanges that characterized notable clientelism contravened democratic principles and were thus acts of corruption that one had to eradicate in order to moralize public life.

The Clientelism of Parties and Political Modernization

However, the increasing specialization of political activity did not bring an end to clientelistic practices. Of course, these were progressively depreciated as the norms of civic citizenship spread and legal sanctions for electoral corruption were put in place. Nevertheless, the expansion of interventions by states and local authorities generated new possibilities for politicians to control public resources and, in so doing, mobilize electoral support. Social policies, urban renewal, or subsidies for economic development could all be used to fuel these “political machines.” Be they in the American cities during the first half of the twentieth century or southern regions of Italy after World War II, these machines coordinated clientelistic distribution of collective goods (housing, jobs, subsidies) on a large scale in order to support local “bosses.”

Some political scientists have gone so far as to use the term clientelistic state to qualify political systems within which a dominant party takes over the bureaucracy, collective goods, and their distribution in order to preserve its hegemony. This analysis highlighted cases such as the Mexican Institutional Revolutionary party, the Japanese Liberal Democratic party, and the Italian Christian Democrats, who all remained constantly in power between the 1950s and 1980s. In these cases, clientelistic relations developed within entire sectors (ministries, business organizations, lobbies, trade unions, etc.).

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