Clientelism, Interests, and Democratic Representation: The European Experience in Historical and Comparative Perspective. Edited by Simona Piattoni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 256p. $60.00 cloth, $22.00 paper

Extract

This volume traces the origins of clientelism, defined as “the trade of votes and other types of partisan support in exchange for public decisions with divisible benefits” (p. 4), in eight European countries: England, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden, from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth century. It has two main goals: to identify the incentives that make clientelism feasible or unacceptable, and to challenge the view recently advanced by Robert Putnam (Making Democracy Work 1993) that polities can be nicely divided between clientelist polities (i.e., those in which particular interests are promoted) and civic polities (i.e., those in which particular interests are expressed as part of the general interest).