Political patronage

Este artículo reexamina la idea de Lijphart (1997) de que el voto obligatorio sea un instrumento efectivo para reducir la desigualdad del ingreso con un diseño de investigación cuasi experimental basado en la técnica de matching. Los resultados muestran que el voto obligatorio no tiene un impacto significativo sobre las políticas redistributivas. En base a la experiencia de América Latina, donde predomina el voto obligatorio junto a alta desigualdad de ingresos, el artículo sostiene que el problema empírico del argumento lijphartiano se encuentra en el supuesto implícito de la existencia de un vínculo programático entre políticos y electores. Se sugiere como hipótesis alternativa que la combinación de alta participación electoral y alta desigualdad puede deberse a la prevalencia de un vínculo clientelar, frecuente en democracias con instituciones débiles.

It has long been recognized that the presence of politicians on the boards of directors of public firms may create inefficiencies. Nevertheless, research has so far neglected the effect of political affiliation on the appointment of Members of Parliament to the boards of public firms. This article intends to fill this gap by conducting an empirical analysis on a sample of 945 deputies of the Italian Parliament elected over the period 1996-2001. Regression discontinuity estimates show that the center-left coalition is about 25 percentage points more likely to appoint its Members of Parliament to the board of public enterprises than the center-right coalition. Political appointments become more pronounced when the center-left forms a governing coalition.

Purpose-According to the traditional view of public administration, a critical component of good policy formulation is the provision of frank and fearless advice to elected decision-makers. This advice can be provided by permanent public officials or by the people selected by the elected governments to fill key and continuing posts. However, there are major questions as to whether new Governor-in-Council (GIC) appointment processes rooted in new public governance (NPG) are yielding the expected results promised, such as less partisanism, as a consideration for appointment. Design/methodology/approach-The paper uses a mixed methods approach to examine the GIC process as it is used in Canada. In using these methods, the authors employed interviews with senior officials, governmental documents review and expert validation interviews to triangulate its main findings. Findings-The paper uses the case of the revised appointment process for GIC appointments in Canada and suggests that the new arrangements do not deliver on merit-based criteria that ensures independence is protected between political executive and senior bureaucratic officials. Although new processes may be more open and transparent than past processes, the paper suggests that such processes are more susceptible to partisan influence under the guise of being merit-based. Research limitations/implications-The research was limited to one country context, Canada. As such, it will be necessary to expand this to other Westminster countries. Testing whether manifestations of new public governance in appointment processes elsewhere will be important to validate whether Canada is unique or not. Practical implications-The authors are left to wonder if this innovation of merit-based appointments in the new administrative state is obscuring the lines of accountability and whether it forms the basis for good policy advice despite promises to the contrary. Social implications-Trust in the government is affected by decisions behind closed doors. They appear partisan, even when they may not be. Process matters if only to highlight increased value placed on meritorious appointments. Originality/value-Previous studies on GIC appointments have generally been to explore representation as a value. That is, studies have questioned whether diversity is maintained, for example. However, few studies have explored appointment processes using institutional approaches to examine whether reforms to such processes have respected key principles, such as merit and accountability.

This article aims at offering a framework for analysing party patronage and state politicisation based on game-theoretic reasoning. It is argued that in order to reveal the main causal mechanisms behind these phenomena, one can focus on the cooperation between political parties analysis based on the model of prisoner’s dilemma. The article identifies four sets of obstacles to party cooperation in Central and Eastern
Europe: unstable and polarised party systems; “the rules of the game” legitimising party patronage; dense party networks and their building through patronage; and insufficient regulation and weak enforcement of the merit principle in state administrations. The influence of these causal mechanisms in the post-communist countries can be explored through historical process-tracing and other methods. Finally, the article proposes several country-specific hypotheses for the empirical study of party patronage and state politicisation in Lithuania.

This article seeks to explore and discuss the complex issues of post-colonial democracy and the role of political brokerage in it. The paper argues that it is highly problematic to explain post-colonial democracy through the prism of western normative theories since the post-colonial state formation and its historical trajectories are entirely different from the history of western state formation. Based on field work in one of the neighbourhoods of Sialkot, Punjab, the article explains that the political broker/mediator plays pivotal role in post-colonial democracies like Pakistan. It explains how a broker negotiates with bureaucracy and government officials on behalf of the common people who do not have an easy access to the government departments by engaging political parties/leaders. The brokers are the key players in democratic process. The arguments does not fit into the normative theoretical grid hence we cannot analytically rely on the normative theorization to explain the post-colonial democracy.

In 2004, an unlikely combination of rural insurgent groups and urban gangs fought over the fate of President Aristide and brought Haiti to the brink of civil war. Ten years on, the country is still plagued by instances of armed violence. While most policy experts and practitioners seem to agree that over the last decade, violence transformed from a political into a criminal phenomenon, scholars remain divided over the question of whether Haiti's urban armed groups should be framed as a political movement or as hardened criminals. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and overt observation conducted during six months of fieldwork in Haiti in 2013, this article argues that it is crucial to refocus the analysis on the functions gangs fulfil on behalf of their politico-criminal sponsors. In contrast to the proclaimed internal shift from political to criminal motivation, this approach suggests that the constantly changing priorities of political entrepreneurs and organised crime groups shape the nature of the violent service offered by urban armed groups. The findings of this article mirror comparable dynamics in other countries in Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa and have crucial implications for international agencies working in the urban environment and dealing with urban armed groups.

Using Sri Lanka’s iconic presidential elections of January 2015 as a backdrop, we engage with how elite patrimonial politics and everyday moralities around grain access and distributive justice come to intersect with one another. With a focus on mainstream media, campaign speeches, and political propaganda discourses, we begin by exploring how rice was initially politicized during the highly charged presidential campaign, and why it subsequently disappeared from public gaze as the electoral media wars drew to a close. In particular, we analyse how the president incumbent – Maithripala Sirisena’s campaign mythologies continued to draw on the symbolic and historicised image of the Rajarata paddy cultivator, particularly at a time when a vastly different reality was being purported, entailing localised paddy mill-owning oligarchies implicating close family members.

The stream of consciousness mode is a key feature of James Joyce’s Ulysses, but Xiao Qian and Wen Jieruo have turned a blind eye on this as they followed a more socio-political strategy to drop Joyce’s psychological modes altogether from their translation. Xiao and Wen have a reason for choosing said strategy despite Xiao’s familiarity with the technique. Several factors forced them to drop the stream of consciousness mode in favor of a politically-correct format. After all, historical developments did not allow literary Modernism to thrive and Ulysses to be accepted in 20th–century China. The quarrel between the leftists and the rightists among men of literature contributed to this negative atmosphere. Then, the rise of communism made things even worse with the state’s subsequent coercion of writers and translators to toe the official line. But perhaps the single most determining factor was the Cultural Revolution and its attendant atrocities. Xiao was labeled a rightist, purged by Mao’s Red Guards, banished to a Chinese gulag, and was forbidden from writing after his release. Political persecution made him extra cautious, and their decision to jettison Joyce’s stream of consciousness mode is understandable. In Translation and Conflict, Mona Baker brings forward the concept of “selective appropriation,” which she argues to be evident in patterns of omission and addition that are traceable in the target text itself. Relevant historical events, personal accounts from Xiao and Wen, as well as more recent studies by PRC scholars show that their strategy of purging the stream of consciousness technique altogether from their translation is a classic example of selective appropriation resulting from self-censorship, of adopting a translation strategy in consideration of political reality. This paper examines Xiao and Wen’s translation strategy by comparing sample excerpts, and provides a historical account of decisive historical events.

This article examines power dynamics in political groupings during
the 2014 Afghanistan presidential election and assesses the impact on
political stability and order. The focus is the power dynamics of local
political-economic and identity networks that have come to underpin
and constitute the state in post-2001 international state-building.
The article first seeks to understand how the complex relationships
between the two leading presidential candidates, Ashraf Ghani and
Abdullah Abdullah, and key powerbrokers were negotiated and
subsequently influenced electoral outcomes. Second, focusing on
negotiations over the appointment of the Cabinet ministers, advisers
and staff, and governors, the study maps the restructuring of political
networks within the Afghan state. The analysis reveals the impact of
the election on the redistribution of power and resources, and the
consequences for political order and state stability in the post-2014
period.

Oxford, Oxford-Sciences Po Research Group, decembrer 2011, 14 p. on ligne <http://www.politics.ox.ac.uk/materials/centres/oxpo/working-papers/wp_10-11/OXPO_10-11f_Cahen.pdf> (working paper OXPO_10-11f).
Written version of a paper delivered at the African History & Politics Seminar, 21 February 2011, directed by William Beinart (Professor of Race Relations, St Antony's College), Department of Politics & International Relations, African Studies Centre and Oxford Research Network on Governance in Africa (Orenga).
Abstract: Renamo has been the subject of controversy since it was created, no doubt by the Rhodesian secret services, and, afterwards, supported by apartheid South Africa to counter the " Marxist-Leninist " Frelimo single-party regime. Nevertheless, by winning more than one-third of the votes in the first pluralist elections of 1994, Renamo proved that it had a social base. After a huge increase in 1999, Renamo was harshly defeated in the 2004 and 2009 elections. Few studies have been produced from field research within Renamo, which is the case of this article based on former field research in 1994, 2000, and more recently 2006, 2007 and 2009. It aims to study the main reasons behind this inability to build an opposition political party capable of mobilizing people against the arbitrary rule of State neo-patrimonialism. Two main reasons are identified: first, in spite of becoming a civilian party, Renamo has maintained a military-style internal rule, in which nobody can develop their own agency; second, Renamo tries to mimic Frelimo, developing a poor form of clientelism when Frelimo is able to develop a rich one, closely linked with State patronage. Renamo has not been able to develop through day-today activity of a " trade-unionism " kind, mobilizing people to demand rights within the Republic rather than favours from the Master.

Corrupt exchanges are often brokered by a third party, but this phenomenon has not been satisfactorily explored by researchers of corruption. Literature on brokerage in general provides interesting models but they have not previously been applied to corrupt exchanges. Based on in-depth qualitative interviews with respondents who participated in actual corrupt transactions, this paper identifies several distinct brokerage types in low-level corruption in contemporary Hungary. The paper also provides explanation of variation in corruption brokerage in terms of actors' group affiliations, forms of the corrupt exchanges, brokerage mechanisms, as well as neutrality, benefit and motivation, risk distribution, and stability of the brokerage structure. Finally, we discuss some policy implications of corruption brokerage.

Despite his reputation as one of the most successful English monarchs of the middle ages, Edward I has never been seen as a generous king. This article looks afresh at the accepted view of Edward I as a miserly king and, by examining his relationship with his earls, seeks to demonstrate that Edward had a sophisticated and judicious approach to patronage which was based upon rewarding good service.

The politics of patronage democracy is referring to the allocation of state resources to his staunch supporters such as timber concession, job vacancies in government and many more. In return, his loyal supporters must vote for him in the elections. However, patronage democracy also brings great impact toward class societies practicing social stratification systems. The social stratification system means the differences between two different groups of people based on their social status towards their everyday social interactions. Kenyah community from Long San, Baram, Miri, in Sarawak (Malaysia) provides a good example for this study by showing the implication of politics of patronage democracy on Kenyah society. Furthermore, researcher used in depth interview, unstructured interview, participant observation, case studies and genealogy system technique as tool of collecting data.

In this paper I look at the similarities and differences between the Japanese and Nigerian Patron-Client System. This paper also examines why the use of the same political system has led to such drastic differences in the way each government operates with its citizens.

This chapter will investigate the relationship between elections and democratic development in the Philippines. It will trace the emergence and institutionalization of electoral politics at various junctures in Philippine history. Essentially, it will determine the degree of proportionality in which votes are translated into political mandates. Lastly, it will explore the modalities of reforming the electoral system in order to enrich the democratization process.

In 1525 Catherine of Austria came to Portugal armed with Flemish tapestries, illuminated manuscripts,family jewels, and a lavish wardrobe, the requisite dowry of a Castilian princess destined to be queen. These personal goods that formed the nucleus of her collection evolved into one that later clearly defineed her social and political position, reflecting a particular hierarchy and symbolism. As a foreign-born queen, Catherine used her possessions to create her own identity at the Portuguese court. Shortly after her arrival sometime between 1525 and 1528, Catherine began collecting imported wares, luxury goods, Chinese silk and porcelain, gems, and jewelry from India and the Far East, available to her through agents stationed in Goa, Malacca and Macau. She created a system that allowed her to purchase directly overseas and key hubs of the Portuguese trade network.

XI ANTONIO CABEZA Facción y mecenazgo en la Roma de Felipe II: una red castellana en la corte pontificia 1 MANUEL VAQUERO PIÑEIRO La chiesa di San Giacomo degli Spagnoli e la fiscalità pontificia nel XVI secolo 25 GAETANO SABATINI-RENATA SABENE Il finanziamento della costruzione di San Pietro e la Crociata di Spagna: interessi economici e relazioni diplomatiche tra Monarchia Cattolica e Chiesa di Roma 40 FERNANDO MARÍAS Pintura, diplomacia y censura en la Cappella Paolina: desde Toledo y Madrid hasta Roma 58 SILVIA DANESI SQUARZINA Becerra e il michelangiolismo in Spagna 87 FLAVIO RURALE L'élite regolare: morale e politica dei chierici di corte tra Cinque e Seicento 105 ALESSIA LIROSI L'influenza della spiritualità spagnola sull'arte monastica romana: il caso di San Giuseppe a Capo le Case 119 PAOLA PICARDI Il monastero di San Giuseppe a Capo le Case a Roma: committenti spagnoli, filospagnoli e artisti italiani 143 ANNA D'AMELIO Committenti spagnoli e artisti fiamminghi a Roma fra XVI e XVII secolo 160 LAURA GORI Una famiglia filospagnola tra Cinquecento e Seicento: i Caetani di Sermoneta. Dinamiche politiche e aspetti culturali 176 P D F A u t o r e D a v i d G a r c í a C u e t o SABINA DE CAVI L'invio da Roma di un corredo per il battesimo di Anna d'Austria (1601): Pantoja de la Cruz, Bartolomé González e il ritratto degli infanti di Spagna all'epoca di Filippo III 193 DONATELLA GAGLIARDI Para una semblanza de la Monarquía española en las sátiras póstumas de Traiano Boccalini 231 ADOLFO CARRASCO El conde duque de Olivares, un nuevo Séneca. Estoicismo romano y cultura política barroca 245 LAURA FACCHIN Il cardinale Cesare Monti curiale romano e nunzio in Spagna: strategie artistiche e collezionismo 265 ÁNGEL RIVAS ALBALADEJO Viaje, casa, secretaría, celebraciones y algunos aspectos culturales de la embajada del VI conde de Monterrey en Roma (1628-1631) 310 DAVID GARCÍA CUETO La acción cultural y el mecenazgo de los cardenales-embajadores de Felipe IV en Roma: Borja y Albornoz 340 FRANCESCA CURTI La collezione d'arte di Juan de Córdoba, agente spagnolo a Roma al servizio di Diego Velázquez 362 PANAYOTIS K. IOANNOU «Con la solita curiosità di questi tali»: artisti e copisti nei servizi segreti spagnoli tra Roma e Madrid 393 ALESSANDRA ANSELMI Antiveduto Grammatica, Cassiano dal Pozzo e Vittorio Amedeo di Savoia: un dono per Margarita de la Cruz e un problematico, inedito, Sant'Agostino nelle Descalzas Reales di Madrid. Tra politica e devozione, l'espressione degli affetti 407 ANDREA SPIRITI Committenza e strategie artistiche e architettoniche dei cardinali lombardi nella Roma del Seicento 460

ANNEMARIE JORDAN GSCHWEND

LES PEINTRES DE LA REINE : ANTOINE TROUVÉON ET ANTHONIS MOR
AU SERVICE D’ÉLÉONORE D’AUTRICHE, REINE DE PORTUGAL PUIS REINE DE FRANCE

ABSTRACT | RÉSUMÉ
Éléonore d’Autriche, la soeur aînée de Charles Quint, grandit à la cour de Mechelen (Malines), où peintres et galeries de portraits jouaient un rôle important. Adolescente, Éléonore vécut entourée par la collection de portraits réunie pas sa tante Marguerite d’Autriche, régente des
Pays-Bas. Nous examinons ici l’influence de Marguerite sur Éléonore, la future reine de Portugal puis de France, mécène de deux portraitistes : Antoine Trouvéon, engagé à la cour des Valois, et Anthonis Mor, actif à Bruxelles. Éléonore envoya les deux artistes à la cour de Lisbonne en tant qu’émissaires spéciaux afin d’exécuter des portraits de sa fille Marie de
Portugal. L’infante portugaise était renommée pour sa beauté, son intelligence et sa vertu.
Éléonore espéra d’abord l’unir à la cour des Valois et ensuite à sa famille Habsbourg. Sonobjectif était un mariage dynastique digne du rang de Marie. Exécutés en vue de deux missions
secrètes distinctes, ces portraits constituent un témoignage extraordinaire de deux projets d’union qui ne se réalisèrent jamais.

"Transboundary haze pollution is an almost annual occurrence in Southeast Asia. Haze originates  from peat and forest fires mostly in Indonesia, with Malaysia and Singapore suffering the worst of its effects. Most of these fires are manmade, and linked to land clearing activities of local and foreign commercial oil palm plantations. The regional nature of haze has concentrated mitigation activities at the ASEAN level. However these initiatives continually fail to effectively mitigate haze. This article argues that haze mitigation has been problematic due to the ASEAN
style of regional engagement, which prioritizes the maintenance of national sovereignty. States are compelled to act in their national interests, as opposed to the collective regional interests.The economic importance of the oil palm sector to the states involved, coupled with traditionallyclose relationships between key economic actors and political elites, meant that the maintenance of the status quo, where major plantation companies could continue to clear land using the cost-effective method of burning, was of crucial national interest. Therefore, the ASEAN style of regional engagement has enabled member states to shape ASEAN initiatives to preserve the interests of these political and economic elite, while the public continue to suffer the haze."

Despite the recent electoral defeat of the Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, Hindu nationalist organizations led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) remain a dominant force in several parts of India particularly as most of them operate outside the electoral arena as charitable NGOs providing welfare services such as education and healthcare to poor urban communities. In fact, economic liberalization in India has been accompanied by massive welfare projects initiated by Hindu right-wing organizations.

La monarquia de Felipe II a debate, ed. Luis Ribot. Sociedad Estatal para la Conmemoraciön de los Centenarios
de Felipe II y Carlos V, Madrid, 2000

This essay explores the patronage and collections of Juana and Maria of Austria, not only at their respective courts in Spain and Austria, but also during their residencies at the Descalzas Reales Convent in Madrid. This convent founded in 1555, was built by Juana after 1557. The author sourced many unpublished documents and inventories from archives in Spain and in Portugal. A number of documents located in Lisbon, proves for the first time that the renowned court architect, Juan de Herrera, designed Juana of Austria's funerary chapel in the Descalzas convent. Pompeo Leone, court sculptor, was commissioned to executed Juana's funerary statue.

This paper aims to conceptualize the Syrian regime under the rule of Hafez and Bashar al-Assad (1970-2011) as a neopatrimonial regime. The paper claims that the neopat-rimonial domination of the Assad regime bases on three pillars; the personalization of the regime, the patronage networks and the clientelism. Under the subtitle of per-sonalization the Syrian regime, the paper tries to lay down the historical process and mechanisms used to personal-ized the regime under Hafez and Bashar al-Assad, through using the personal clique and the imposed personal cult. Following, the paper figures out the dual patronage networks that the Assad regime has utilized to consolidate his personal domination through penetrate the bureaucratic realm and the society; the Alawite patronage and the Baath Party patronage. In the same context, the paper evaluates the clientelism as another mechanism functions in the patrimonial penetration processes, mainly in the economic domain, and the changes that took place in this regard under Bashar al-Assad's rule.

African countries have increasingly embraced devolution as a strategy to improve governance, promote accountability, remedy institutional deficiencies and democracy that highly centralized governments have engendered. In 2010, the government of Kenya did a momentous task by constituting a new constitution that outlines the functions of a devolved
system of governance. Devolution in Kenya attempts to bring government closer to the people by devolving economic, and political resources to Kenya´s forty-seven county governments. It also envisaged to give the power of self-governance to the people and enhance their participation in governance. The thesis aims to investigate and analyze the impact of the devolved government on democratic governance through a legal framework, service delivery, public participation, capacity building, social unity, and political interests. It uses Makueni and Murang’a county as a case study. Makueni county is christened as one of the best performing counties, while Murang’a county is one of the struggling counties with several governance issues. The thesis attempts to gauge the range to which devolution has been implemented at the county level and the effects of devolution. However, since its rollout
in 2013, there has been a mounting public criticism levelled at these devolved units of government based on documented evidence pointing to graft, nepotism, cronyism, ethnicity, corruption, misallocation of economic and political resources, incompetence and failure to pay bills for services rendered and other similar malpractices that exhibit a culture of impunity that Kenyans have got socialized to since independence,1963. These results are credible and generalizable, in several cases, for other counties in Kenya.

This project is a socio-historic analysis of two late 14th century dream visions: Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess and the Pearl poem. Utilizing Robert Pogue Harrison’s concept of objectifying grief through ritualized communal mourning, this thesis examines the ways in which mourning literature functioned as consolatory device, and a form of public performance for the powerful patrons who commissioned the pieces. By engaging with pre-existing communities of grief, material culture, and courtly discourse these poems perform the work of mourning while simultaneously enacting modes of public performativity that stress the ethics of grieving, and suggest that, for royal patrons, it is imperative for the stability of the commonwealth that they respond appropriately to loss. In performing the work of mourning the texts advocate for a unity between public and private selves, enacting the principle that for a great leader the private is always public.

Neoliberalism is never uniform. Instead, it is always hybridized and imbricated within existing political economic matrixes and sociocultural process. In the Cambodian context neoliberalism is characterized by its intersection with kleptocracy, and specifically the ways in which patronage has enabled local elites to transform, co-opt, and (re)articulate neoliberal reforms through a framework that has focused on ‘asset stripping’ public resources. This chapter examines the Royal Government of Cambodia’s (RGC) discursive positioning of populism vis-à-vis international ‘enemies’ inasmuch as it presents a convenient pretext for the tensions of neoliberal development. This discussion critiques the frequent suggestion that the RGC maintains a ‘communist’ outlook rather than recognizing the kleptocratic ‘shadow state’ practices that have been modified to accommodate a neoliberal modality. I then turn my attention more specifically to the mechanisms of Cambodia’s patronage system via an analysis of privatization and primitive accumulation. I assess these developments through a critique of the purview that legal reform will somehow serve as cure-all for development, contrasting this idea with the realities of a judiciary firmly entrenched within patron relations. The degree of political patronage in Cambodia reflects a certain nepotism, or what I am calling ‘nepoliberalism’ to signify a particular application of neoliberalism that is never without the influence of patron politics. The enduring impunity of those with connections to power is the concentration of the final section before the conclusion, where I assess the continuing constraints of the poor with regards to patronage and the inequality and precarity it affords. It is here, in the question of (in)security that Cambodia’s neoliberalization alongside patronage demonstrates the depth of kleptocracy and violence in the country.

The book rests on the premise that remote border regions offer an exciting study arena that can tell us important things about how marginal citizens relate to their nation-state.The basic assumption is that central state authority in the Indonesian borderlands has never been absolute, but waxes and wanes, and state rules and laws are always up for local interpretation and negotiation. In its role as key symbol of state sovereignty, the borderland has become a place were central state authorities are often most eager to govern and exercise power. But as illustrated, the borderland is also a place were state authority is most likely to be challenged, questioned and manipulated as border communities often have multiple loyalties that transcend state borders and contradict imaginations of the state as guardians of national sovereignty and citizenship.


“This pioneering study of state formation ‘at the margins’ forms a perfect demonstration of the promise of borderland studies. Eilenberg argues convincingly that borderlands – and the international borders that run through them – are critical sites for understanding shifting state-society relations. His book provides a powerful analysis of the local historical contexts of resource struggles, state policies and social strategies in what many consider to be a remote and insignificant Indonesian borderland. Eilenberg makes us realize how the unpredictable dynamics of such borderland societies affect entire nation-states”.

Willem van Schendel, Amsterdam University


“Eilenberg’s rich insights could not have been achieved without years spent developing trust and experiencing firsthand the ambiguity of a border as a zone of opportunity as well as control. The analysis of the border elite who combine traditional authority with bureaucratic ones, charisma with force, and legal practices with illegal ones throws into sharp relief a set of practices that are found not only on the fringes of the Indonesian nation, but on the fringes of its cities as well. Anyone interested in understanding how power works in Indonesia should read this book”.

Tania Murray Li, University of Toronto

After an examination of the ways in which the Mediterranean and modernity have been defined in contradistinction to each other, this chapter shows how an analysis of the similarities and differences among the three main strands of modern Mediterraneanist studies—honor and shame, patronage, and cosmopolitanism—may help us overcome the academic separation between nostalgic images of past Mediterraneans and lamenting accounts of the current state of affairs. By searching for structural similarities across periods more than for continuities through them, and by liberating our concept of processes of regional formation from any time-bound or essence-based definition, we may discover that the Mediterranean can re-emerge as a transnational constellation in modern times.

This thesis attempts to understand the impact of the nature of the Assad regime on the trajectory of the conflict which took place in Syria following the 2011 uprising. It argues that the Assad regime which has been ruling Syria since 1970 represents a case of neopatrimonial regime. The thesis elaborates the neopatrimonial conceptualization tracing the concept back to its Weberian roots. It follows the evolution of the concept from the ‘traditional’ patrimonialism to the modern ‘neo’ patrimonialism. The thesis claims that the neopatrimonial regime consolidates its power through personalization of the regime, patronage and clientelism networks. The claim puts forth is that through neopatrimonialism, the Assad regime was able to consolidate its patrimonial domination and penetrate the bureaucratic realm as well as the society through the patronage and clientelism networks. The thesis argues that the neopatrimonialism had fostered the durability of the regime, and limited the outcomes of the conflict to a rocking between a re-stabilization of the regime and an uncertain revolution, and has influenced the trajectory of the conflict which dragged the country into a state of civil war.

Why has the EU’s promotion of Rule of Law (RoL) triggered different and largely surface-thin reforms across countries subject to a similar frame of enlargement in the Western Balkans (WB)? We hypothesize that the domestic (non)enforcement of EU promoted rules depends on the mobilization of politically autonomous constituencies of change – organized advocacy groups and autonomous state institutions – which amount domestic accountability. The empirical investigation focuses on the prosecution of political corruption as empirical foci to assessing the travails of EU-promoted rules in the domestic context. Specifically, we trace the role of (1) EU’s RoL promotion strategy, (2) political resistance and (3) domestic accountability in explaining different records of prosecution of political corruption in Albania and Croatia.

The proliferation of irregular armed actors which defy simplistic definition has caught public and academic attention alike, not least in the pages of this journal. To move the debate on non-state armed groups (NSAGs) forward, this article seeks to enhance our conceptual understanding of parochial armed groups which are not primarily driven by ideological or religious objectives. Thus, this article clarifies similarities as well as differences between subtypes of community-based armed groups (CBAGs) on the one hand, and between CBAGs and other NSAGs, on the other hand. By doing so, a typology is developed that classifies militias, gangs and vigilantes on the basis of their political, economic and security-related dimensions. The resulting ideal types are discussed through the lenses of different explanatory frameworks and policy debates in the field of contemporary security studies. A major typological issue is the tendency for CBAGs to ‘turn bad’ and become threats to the stability they were expected to transform, becoming a serious problem in countries where they operate. It is concluded that the challenge of CBAGs ultimately needs to be addressed by putting in place a functioning state that can tackle the underlying woes that led to their proliferation in the first place.

Power and Patronage examines the unwritten rules and inner workings of contemporary China's local politics and government. It exposes how these rules have helped to keep the one-Party state together during decades of tumultuous political, social, and economic change.

While many observers of Chinese politics have recognized the importance of informal institutions, this book explains how informal local groups actually operate, paying special attention to the role of patronage networks in political decision-making, political competition, and official corruption. While patronage networks are often seen as a parasite on the formal institutions of state, Hillman shows that patronage politics actually help China's political system function. In a system characterized by fragmented authority, personal power relations, and bureaucratic indiscipline, patronage networks play a critical role in facilitating policy coordination and bureaucratic bargaining. They also help to regulate political competition within the state, which reduces the potential for open conflict. Understanding patronage networks is essential for understanding the resilience of the Chinese state through decades of change.

Power and Patronage is filled with rich and fascinating accounts of the machinations of patronage networks and their role in the ruthless and sometimes violent competition for political power.