Entrepreneurship in and around institutional voids: A case study from Bangladesh ☆

The analysis presented here is an effort to elaborate the patron-client model of association, developed largely by anthropologists, and to demonstrate its applicability to political action in Southeast Asia. Inasmuch as patron-client structures are not unique to Southeast Asia but are much in evidence, particularly in Latin America, in Africa, and in less developed portions of Europe, the analysis may possibly have more general value for understanding politics in preindustrial societies. After defining the nature of patron-client ties and distinguishing them from other social ties, the paper discriminates among patron-client ties to establish the most important dimensions of variation, examines both the survival and transformations in patron-client links in Southeast Asia since colonialism and the impact of major social changes such as the growth of markets, the expanded role of the state, and the creation of local regimes. Finally, the paper shows how patron-client bonds interact with electoral politics to create distributive pressures which, in turn, often lead to inflationary fiscal policies and vulnerability of regimes to losses of revenue.

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Patron-Client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia

1. Citizen-politician linkages: an introduction Herbert Kitschelt and Steven I. Wilkinson 2. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss? The evolution of political clientelism in Africa Nicolas Van de Walle 3. Monopoly and monitoring: an approach to political clientelism Luis Fernando Medina and Susan C. Stokes 4. Counting heads: a theory of voter and elite behavior in patronage democracies Kanchan Chandra 5. Explaining changing patterns of party-voter linkages in India Steven I. Wilkinson 6. Politics in the middle: mediating relationships between the citizens and the state in rural North India Anirudh Krishna 7. Rethinking economics and institutions: the voter's dilemma and democratic accountability Mona M. Lyne 8. Clientelism and portfolio diversification: a model of electoral investment with applications to Mexico Beatriz Magaloni, Alberto Diaz-Cayeros and Federico Estevez 9. From populism to clientelism? The transformation of labor-based party linkages in Latin America Steven Levitsky 10. Correlates of clientelism: political economy, politicized ethnicity, and postcommunist transition Henry Hale 11. Political institutions and linkage strategies Wolfgang C. Muller 12. Clientelism in Japan: the importance and limits of institutional explanations Ethan Scheiner 13. The demise of clientelism in affluent capitalist democracies Herbert Kitschelt 14. A research agenda for the study of citizen-politician linkages and democratic accountability Herbert Kitschelt and Steven I. Wilkinson.

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Patrons, Clients and Policies: Patterns of Democratic Accountability and Political Competition

The authors demonstrate that sharply different policy choices across democracies can be explained as a consequence of differences in the ability of political competitors to make credible pre-electoral commitments to voters. Politicians can overcome their credibility deficit in two ways. First, they can build reputations. This requires that they fulfill preconditions that in practice are costly: informing voters of their promises; tracking those promises; ensuring that voters turn out on election day. Alternatively, they can rely on intermediaries -- patrons - who are already able to make credible commitments to their clients. Endogenizing credibility in this way, the authors find that targeted transfers and corruption are higher and public good provision lower than in democracies in which political competitors can make credible pre-electoral promises. The authors also argue that in the absence of political credibility, political reliance on patrons enhances welfare in the short-run, in contrast to the traditional view that clientelism in politics is a source of significant policy distortion. However, in the long run reliance on patrons may undermine the emergence of credible political parties. The model helps to explain several puzzles. For example, public investment and corruption are higher in young democracies than old; and democratizing reforms succeeded remarkably in Victorian England, in contrast to the more difficult experiences of many democratizing countries, such as the Dominican Republic.

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Democracy, credibility and clientelism

The concept of political clientelism is one if the few genuinely crosscultural concepts available to political scientists for the comparative study of transitional systems. As a descriptive concept, political clientelism helps us uncover patterns of relationships which deviate markedly from those ordinarily associated with class or ethnicity. As an analytic concept political clientelism provides crucial insights into the internal dynamics of social and political change. Moreover, if, as some contend, patterns of resource allocation are more meaningful indicators of political development than their conceptual opposites, political clientelism may well supply the critical “missing link” between micro- and macro-sociological or system-centered theories of political development.

Political Clientelism and Ethnicity in Tropical Africa:* Competing Solidarities in Nation-Building

The basic social relations of peasant life are directly related to an environment characterized by extreme scarcity. The major factor of productive wealth in agriculture is land, to which the peasant has little or no free access. Labor—his own, and that of his family members—is available to the peasant, but this relatively unproductive factor must be applied to land in order to generate wealth. Few other outlets for productive labor employment are available to him. When the peasant is able to combine land and labor in a wealth-generating endeavor, his productivity is likely to be extremely low, due to limiting factors such as technology, capital, marketing information, and credit. All of these life aspects combine to hold down the peasant's income and preclude savings. He is, in a word, poor.Furthermore, the peasant is powerless against many threats which abound in his environment. There are disease, accident, and death, among the natural threats. There are violence, exploitation, and injustice at the hands of the powerful, among the human threats. The peasant knows that this environmental constellation is dangerous. He also knows that there is relatively little he can do about his situation, and, accordingly, his culture often features themes of vulnerability, calamity, and misfortune. As George Foster has neatly summarized if, the outlook this situation engenders in the peasant is the “Image of the Limited Good.”

Peasant society and clientelist politics.

The rate of modernization in Venezuela over the past forty years has been rapid, even startling, if attention is focussed on the more conspicuous institutions and processes. During this period an agrarian, patrimonially ruled, backward society has been transformed into a highly commercialized urban society governed by a political party system based on widespread popular participation in the electoral process. However-and this is a phenomenon of which social scientists in the United States have become increasingly aware-modernization does not affect people in an evenhanded, uniform manner. While the great transformation in economy and society which we call modernization improves the quality of life for many people, some groups or individuals are bypassed in the process, and some even come to suffer as a consequence of it.1 Therefore, the level of modernity and personal well-being achieved in the most advanced sectors of a society will often be irrelevant as an indicator of welfare in those pockets of deprivation left behind or created in the general march of progress.2 The vigor and effectiveness with which the problems of the deprived are attacked as a matter of significant public policy depends on the relationship between governing elites and the deprived groups or individuals. In this essay, attention will be focussed primarily on the development of, and changes in, the relationship between an historically deprived class in Venezuelan society-the peasantry-and the modernizing political elites which, after a thirty-year struggle, consolidated their claim to govern-

John Duncan Powell

Papers

Peasant society and clientelist politics.

Venezuelan Agrarian Problems in Comparative Perspective