Clientelism, like corruption, is a juicy topic; it is made so by the seemingly-inexorable conflict between protestations of public virtue on the one hand and particularistic exchanges on the other. The topic becomes even more interesting when one tries, as Simona Piattoni does in her book Il clientelismo: L’Italia in prospettiva comparata, to rehabilitate clientelism, and rid the concept of its moral overtones by engaging in rigorous comparative and empirical analysis.
Read the rest here. It came out a bit harsher than I meant.
It is bit unfair to criticize a scholar for trying to answer her own questions (what types of clientelism are there) instead of other people’s ones (Banfield, Putnam, etc.). However, it is true that there is an old-school Italian way of doing research that is content with classifying things, instead of investigating causes and consequences.
Link | February 4th, 2010 at 5:23 pm
Yes, it is a bit unfair. But suppose the following:
You’re investigating some phenomenon which people say causes bad things.
You say, some types of this phenomenon are relatively good.
You still have to say whether relatively good examples of having this phenomenon are better than this phenomenon being absent.
If you don’t, then your argument is, “some types of phenomenon are bad, but others are really bad”. That, to me, is not that interesting an argument.
Link | February 4th, 2010 at 5:42 pm
I think that Italian politics is a topic too depressing and disgusting to discuss.
Link | February 20th, 2010 at 4:19 pm