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 reasons to suppose the contrary. The choice to focus on these regime types is even more surprising when one considers the content of Lane’s framework. The idea of a principal and an agent engaging in a contractual relationship is a very modern idea. It presupposes independent dispute resolvers of the kind found in modern states governed by the rule of law and equipped with a functioning judicial system (Laffont and Martimort, 2002: 32). It implies that inequalities prior to contract result only from the resources available to each actor and the value of their ‘exit option’ – that is, their non-contractual alternative.

It is surprising to suppose that either of these conditions is true in the kind of patrimonial states that Lane discusses, such as the Egyptian kingdom, or the Mongol empire. Nor can it even be considered as a useful metaphor in these circumstances. Strictly speaking, they are also false in modern democracies, although some enterprising types have tried to enforce the provisions of various ‘contracts’ offered by electioneering politicians. The idea of contract is therefore a metaphor that is at the heart of Lane’s
framework. This is very different from principal-agent theory as applied in economics, where contractual relations are
common.

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.