Here’s my review of Jan-Erik Lane’s book Comparative Politics: the principal-agent perspective. Hat-tip to Peter Kenneally for the epigraph.
Prima facie, there seem to be few reasons to believe that the same framework can explain politics in both representative democracies and feudal regimes, or in Westphalian states and their precursors. Indeed, there seem to be strong [...]
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 [...]