This chapter is concerned about the role of elites in autocratic regimes. It focuses mainly on business and military elites and asks how autocracies can bind these actors to their inner sanctum. It reviews previous decades of research, highlighting the recent institutionalist turn in comparative authoritarianism, but also traces back debates about neo-patrimonialism, clientelism, patronage, and corruption. The chapter introduces the conceptual distinction between co-optation in formalized arenas like political parties and parliaments as well as in the shadowland of informality. It argues that intra-elite cohesion can be secured via reactive and preventive measures as well as by absorbing new members (widening) or by interweaving interests and instilling a feeling of reciprocity (deepening) among the elite members. The chapter ends by explicating concrete operationalization advice for empirical research.

Sixteenth-century Spain was at the vanguard of European collegiate bureaucratic rule and imperial governance. This chapter argues that although in the 1490s to 1540s council ministers’ operations were considerably patrimonialist, determined largely by each member’s family interests, by the 1540s to 1590s the Council became substantially more impartial. This occurred in large part due to the influence of women. Vassals’ attempts to shape ministers’ decisions via female connections prompted the council’s fundamental 1542 and 1571 guidelines. Subsequently, Madrid’s anxieties about women’s sway, and surfeits of Indies commodities, stirred misogynistic treatises, royal scrutiny, and an increasingly explicit masculine ministerial ethos. More concretely, monarchs and ministers feared that some of their colleagues and subalterns would become the playthings of court women, who themselves had connections with vassals seeking their cases’ resolution. The actions of indigenous artisans here were particularly notable, as subjects regaled female courtiers with their exquisite goldwork. The resulting backlash against powerful women ensured that gobierno petitioning did not become the domain of the powerful few in the 1500s, and the fiction of the council as mere instruments for the monarchs persisted strongly throughout the second half of the century.

In mid-1975, a sickly Mao had one of the last meetings with the Politburo. During the meeting, Mao shook hands with the entire Politburo, probably for the last time in his life. When he greeted alternate Politburo member and Vice Premier Wu Guixian, Mao confessed, “I don’t know who you are.” An embarrassed Wu said, “Chairman, we met in 1964 during the national day parade.” Mao compounded her embarrassment by responding, “I didn’t know that” (Mao 1975).

This chapter sets out the idea of the moral economy of elections in more theoretical detail, locating it in the context of a particular theoretical approach to the state that draws inspiration from the work of Timothy Mitchell and others, as well as elaborating the description of the patrimonial and civic registers. The chapter also sets out the relationship of this moral economy approach to analytical models that foregound the idea of the norm, arguing that the affective power of the behaviours and language on political subjectivity is better captured by the language of virtue and morality. The chapter concludes with a brief description of three moments that help reveal the tensions between registers of virtue that shape the moral economy of elections.

Introducing the idea that elections can be understood as extended moments in which multiple actors make competing claims to virtue, this chapter sets that argument in the context of an existing literature on voting and democracy in Africa. These competing claims may usefully be understood in terms of two contrasting moral registers, the civic and the patrimonial: the productive tension between these is the basis of the moral economy of elections. The making and remaking of this moral economy is shaped by four key factors: socio-economic context; the structure of political institutions; historical experience; and, the agency of actors. In the three countries studied here the moral economy constrains and enables political action in different ways. Yet in each, the moral economy shows how elections continue to attract such vigorous engagement (even where the outcome in terms of presidential power seems entirely predictable). It further explains why popular participation is not necessarily discouraged by the breaking of electoral rules; why all politicians must speak to both these moral registers; why sub-national electoral contests are often unpredictable. The moral economy approach shows why the secret ballot and adult suffrage do not always simply make national citizens, as some would hope.

State violence in early medieval China was characterized by bloody patrimonial politics that contributed to the high degree of political volatility of the period. Like other times in Chinese history, individual monarchs and dynasties came to power through force of arms and kept order by implementing Chinese legal-bureaucratic systems that legitimized violent punishments. The political instability of the early medieval period often can be traced to the informal, patrimonial political ties that intertwined the court, harem, bureaucracy and military. Males and females of the imperial family, eunuchs and generals became involved in the struggle to rule directly or place a puppet on the throne. Winners frequently killed rivals and their adherents. State violence appears to have been most intense during the periods of political division from 220 to 589 and 907 to 960 when “China” was separated into two or more states with relatively frequent internecine conflicts at courts, interstate wars and dynastic transitions via warfare or usurpation. The geographically unified Sui and Tang empires, lasting from 589 to 907, also were disrupted episodically by bloody conflicts at court and rebellions in the provinces.