Concepts on Clientelism - Uni Bremen

8/3/2019 Concepts on Clientelism - Uni Bremen

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SUMMARY ON

An Introduction to:

THE DYADIC BASIS OF CLIENTELISM1

InFriends, Followers and Factions

By Carl H. Land

Submitted by:

Carolyn Riera

Registration Nr. 1775876

DENGO /FB 8 June 3rd, 2005

Professor Rainer Dombois

Corruption and Clientelism in the Development Context

VAK 08-846

[email protected]

Bremen University

1 Land, Carl H. (1997). The Dyadic Basis of Clientelism. In Schmidt, Steffen/Guasti, Laura/Lande, Carl

H./Scott, James. Friends, Followers and Factions. A Reader in Political Clientelism. Berkerly/L.A., Univ. of

California Press. XIII-XXXVII


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The Dyadic Basis of Clientelism

Among the terms used to denote interpersonal relationships and combinations of such

relationships of varying degrees of complexity and magnitude are dyadic relationships,dyadic non corporate groups and social networks, which have significance for political

analysis:

Dyadic relationships are composed of only two individuals and are micro level

entities.

Dyadic non corporate groups (i.e. patron-client systems or clienteles) consists of sets

of dyadic relationships linked together and are at middle level combinations. These

individuals are involved in relationships, which rely heavily upon personal attachment.

Social Networks are the totality of dyadic relationships, or several dyadic

relationships, within a social field.

Dyadic Relationships

A dyadic relationship connotes personal attachment. It is a voluntary agreement between two

individuals, which involves to come to each others aid in time of need and to exchange

favors. It can be voluntary or obligatory for one or both members. It can exist between two

persons of equal or unequal socio economic status. It can be of short duration, last a lifetime

or be carried on from generation to generation by the descendants of those who created the

original dyad. It can be with diffuse or shape specific obligations. Each ally is expected to

help the other in extreme emergencies, i.e. when aid is most needed. Both allies are expected

to display altruism towards each other.

The exchange of favors serve as means of maintaining a dyadic alliance, as well as to bind

together two allies who can count on each others help in time of need. A favor is something

received on terms more advantageous than those that can be obtained by anyone on the

market or which cannot be obtained on the market at all. A dyadic exchange consist of the

pursuit of private goals. The ally commits himself to pay the full price for what he receives

trough dyadic exchange. Those engaged in dyadic trading often are individuals who are

unalike. Each has sought out the other because the latter has something that he needs but

lacks.

Dyadic alliances involve diffuse obligations, because there is an absence of legal impedimentscapable of enforcing formal contracts. Or because the individuals prefer not to put their

relationship on a contractual basis, or to make it subject to legal oversight. Networks that exist

in the criminal underworld illustrate this point.

In the absence of legal impediments, one member of an alliance may be strongly tempted to

let the alliance come to an end, while the other wishes to maintain it. To maximize the

probability that obligations incurred through such alliances will be honored, various non-legal

methods in addition to the exchange of favors must be employed. These are norms of

reciprocity and of personal loyalty. The Norm of reciprocity demands the people involved to

help those who have helped them and not injure those who have helped them. This norm if

respected assures that unrepaid favors will be repaid. To assure an undefined continuance of adyadic alliance, a useful procedure for dyadic alliance-builders is to load an ally with an

unrepayable debt at a time of great need or at great cost. Accepting such a debt means that

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the indebted ally cannot break the alliance, and must always be ready to respond to a call for

aid, unless he can repay with a favor that is itself of such unrepayable magnitude that it

cancels out the initial debt. The norm of personal loyalty is used to strengthen dyadic

alliances, especially if they are long standing, it requires that the ally responds favorably,

when aid is requested by the counterpart who at that time has lost his ability to reciprocate .

Even though formal and implicit contracts, are legally or ritually validated and are

enforceable through the authority of the particular system that validates them, such as mutual

obligations as assumed by marital partners which are a part of the institution of marriage,

by parents and godparents of their children which are part of the institution of baptism,

by buyers and sellers which are part of the institutions of the market, which all may be

enforced by the authorities which stand behind these institutions, i.e. by Church or the state.

The peasant is tided in an other way to certain relatives, compadres, neighbors and friends

through implicit contracts (which are dyadic alliances).

Dyadic alliances must be supported by a framework of institutionalized relationships,

i.e. relationships, which are continuing , inclusive and prescribe standardized patterns ofinteraction and which are linked to other institutionalized relationships of society.

Two dyadic allies who are also connected with each other through an institutionalized

relationship can be expected to make special efforts to keep their alliances in good order.

While dyadic alliances and institutionalized relationships ordinarily are interrelated, it is

important to keep them separate . This distinction offers insights into the strengths and

weakness of the institutions concerned. Institutional inadequacies invite the creation of dyadic

alliances as an addendum.

Dyadic Non-Corporate Groups

(i.e. families, clans, tribes, guilds,and in modern world organized

interest groups, political parties and nation states)

Dyadic relationships play an important role in the binding together of members of certain

types of non-corporate groups. To understand the nature of these groups, they must be

compared with corporate groups, i.e. families, clans, tribes, guilds, and in modern world

organized interest groups, political parties and nation states. A corporate group is a group

where all members are bound together by virtue of their shared membership in their group and

by their common obligation to protect its interest and fulfill its obligations.

Non-corporate groups have some kind of organization and perform tasks that are well

understood by their members. They can be actions sets, clusters of friends, political factionsand clienteles. The group as such does not have (to a significant degree) property, interests,

aims or duties of its own. Group action is then confined to helping individual members

advance their individual interest and fulfill their own individual obligations. Members are

bound together mainly or wholly by their interpersonal relationships of reciprocal aid, such as

political faction whose members take turns running for public offices and campaigning for

each other. These groups lack boundaries. They are a shade off from those individuals at the

center of a cluster who help and are helped by the greatest number of their fellows to those in

the periphery who give and receive aid from only one or a few members.

Political systems organized on the basis of such groups are characterized by a lack of clear

dividing lines between political groups and a great deal of shifting and switching amongperipheral groups members, i.e. such shifting can be found in politics in the Philippines, in

factional politics in South East Asia, Latin America and the Mediterranean region.

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Intermediaries play an important role. To obtain the aid of other members of the group or

persons outside the group, with whom the individual has no direct personal ties, he may use

an intermediary aid-giver/s and create a dyadic chain.

Clienteles and Patron client relationships

A patron-client relationship is a vertical dyadic alliance.

For example an alliance between two persons of unequal status, power or resources each of

whom finds it useful to have as an ally someone superior or inferior to himself.

The superior member of such an alliance is called a patron.

The inferior member is called his client.

Most patrons are men of superior status and resources maintain alliances with numerous

clients. The higher the patrons status the more clients he can maintain, who then has the

support of a large poorly endowed set of clients. As a result, one often finds a set of vertical

dyads extending upwards from various clients to a single shared patron who is the central

individual of a vertical primary star. It is common for clienteles to be pyramided upon each

other, so that several patrons(each with their own set of clients), are in turn the clients of ahigher patron, who in turn is the client of a patron even higher than himself. In such a pyramid

an individual may be both a patron and a client but never of the same individual.

Under a mutual agreement both landlord and landless peasants have mutual obligations,

which are predictable, continuing , apply to all landlords and tenants in the locality and have

the nature of a contract, which may be enforced, by the state. The landlord is not obliged to

offer anything extra to this mutual agreement. However if he does so it constitutes a special

favor. The establishment of special relationships between a landowner and some of his tenants

and an obvious loyalty to the landlord, constitutes the patron client addendum (addition,

attachment) to the institutionalized landlord-tenant relationship.

The Sharing of Benefits

Horizontal and vertical dyadic relationships rest on the expectations of reciprocity in the

exchange of benefits between the two allies. Dyadic relationships are often subject of

considerable tension and sometimes disruption because one ally believes that the amount he

has received, as compared with what he has given to his ally, is insufficient. Especially in

vertical dyadic relationships it is harder to determine reciprocity for several reasons. The

things exchanged may not be alike and the price cannot be compared with each other.

Traditional feudal clientelism yielded substantial benefits for both patrons and clients, a fact,

which helps to account for the long endurance of this form of dyadic alliance. Long runconsiderations are one of the most important characteristics in dyadic alliances, which

combine different levels of interaction to which different types of measurement are

appropriate. For an alliance to be created and endured, there must be reciprocity. Benefits

must move in both directions. Each ally must remain convinced that his gains exceeds its

costs.

In horizontal dyads the bargaining power of the two is likely to be roughly equal, at least in

the long run. The bargaining power of the higher member of the dyad almost always exceeds

that of his inferior ally.

In vertical dyads the patron has more wealth, status and influence than the client, and gives

more of these to the client than the latter can ever give him in return. What the client gives tothe patron in return is in large part intangible: His personal service, loyalty and acclaim, are

insufficient to balance what the client has received from his patron. The client therefore must

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give something in addition. He gives leadership to the patron and accepts followership for

himself. This last gift is of crucial importance for the structure of clienteles.

Traditional Rural Clientelism and its Decline:

Much of the literature that deals with patron-client relationships between agricultural

landowners and tenants takes place in

medieval and early modern Europe and of offshoots of European society in Latin America

and is called traditional rural clientelism. Both parties are involved in broad spectrum of

reciprocal obligations. The client may not have similar obligations towards his patrons

potential rivals.

The relationship ideally is one of affection and loyalty and , in societies where affection and

loyalty ordinarily is confined to kinsmen2 (parientes),

tends to imitate the relationship between parent and child, involving display of paternalism on

the part of the patron and of deference on the part of the client. Often in such relationshipskinship (consanguinidad -parentesco )

terminology is employed. When a rural society is organized in this fashion, the result is a

highly oligarchical3 political structure. A certain number of rural landowning power figures

are the real political actors and their dependent followings are their human political resources.

The vertical structure of alliances inhibits the emergence of class loyalties or action among

the subordinate client population.

The perfect model of traditional rural clientelism tends to be prevalent in settings where

subordinates are heavily dependent upon their superordinates.

Subordinates are likely to be poor, uneducated, unskilled, legally under-privileged, forbidden

to organize and generally subject to victimization.

Superordinates are likely to be in positions,

where superordination prey upon each other and need private reserves of manpower for

offense and defense.

Both conditions exist in times and places that are to some degree anarchic4.

The break-up of the Roman Empire brought with it in Europe a period of near anarchy out ofwhich grew the clientelistic institutions of feudalism. The expulsion of Spanish colonial rulers

from Latin America resulted in a similar period of ineffective central government, which

created a vacuum that was filled be the clientelistic institution of caudillaje 5. In both cases, the

exposure of poor agriculturist to the dangers of pillage6 and penury7, and the need of wealthy

2Noun (pl.kinsmen orkinswomen) (in anthropological or formal use) one of a person's blood relations.3Oligarchy: a small group of people having control of a country or organization. A town or country governed by an oligarchy.

4Anarchic adjective with no controlling rules or principles to give order.

5Caudillaje (from the word caudillo) designates in ideal-typical fashion a life-style oriented towards values of public leadership. It embraces

a concept of man personified as a leader in a public setting. The word itself may be defined as the domination of a caudillo.6rob or steal with violence, especially in wartime

7Penury extreme poverty. ORIGIN ME: from L. penuria need, scarcity; perh. rel. to paene almost.

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http://www.wordreference.com/es/en/translation.asp?spen=consanguinidadhttp://www.wordreference.com/es/en/translation.asp?spen=parentescohttp://www.wordreference.com/es/en/translation.asp?spen=parentescohttp://www.wordreference.com/es/en/translation.asp?spen=consanguinidadhttp://www.wordreference.com/es/en/translation.asp?spen=parentesco


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landholders for loyal men willing to defend the landowners cause, made men of both social

strata extraordinary dependent upon each other.

What accounts for the decline of traditional rural clientelism ?

Most likely this type of relationships break down when either the superordinate or the

subordinate no longer are willing to fulfill their parts of the relationship. This may be result ofchanges in material conditions, which make such relationships no longer useful.

It may also result from changes in ideology, which makes personal dependency no longer

legitimate, i.e. new ideas of personal freedom and autonomy embodied in town life.

Presumably, both material and ideological forces played parts in the deterioration of the

feudal clientelism.

Corporate Clientelism

It has been observed by Sydney Tarrow and Luigi Graziana in southern Italy a pattern of

politics in which entire local communities and entire peasant, worker, youth or professional

associations deliver the votes of their remembers en bloc to specific politicians or politicalparties in return for various types of rewards for their members, such as development projects

and various other particularistic laws.

Tarrow calls these horizontal clienteles and

Graziano describes the pattern as mass clientelism, or corporative kind of particularism,

which qualitatively is not different from the individual particularism of the interpersonal dyad.

He calls this pattern new clientelism and suggests that it fits the patron client model. It is

certainly true that on a larger scale the new Italian clientelism displays the same structural

features as traditional interpersonal clientelism.

In the new Italian clientelism

there is a trading arrangement between each counterpart,

one being the politician or party which fill the role of the patron,

the other being the town or association which acts as a corporate client.

The relationship between this client and its patron is essentially a dyadic alliance.

Corporate clientelism

represents a distinctive political tactic, which from the point of view of the extent of the goal

towards which action is directed occupies an intermediate position between the individualistic

particularism of interpersonal cleintelist politics and the holly non-localized categorical goals

of class-oriented politics.

In specific countries or regions during specific periods of their history,

corporate clientelism represents a historical stage in the transition from

feudal personal clientelism to

modern supra-local issue-oriented politics.

This may be the case in Italy. There voter who once pursued their interest as lone individuals

or families, have learned the value of joining forces with their fellow townsmen, or with

fellow workers in their own towns, so as to compete more effectively against similar

groupings in other towns

for benefits dispensed by the national government.

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In Italy power is held by

relatively independent and non ideologically oriented politicians

who are prepared to use their legislative powers to deliver concrete benefits of various types

to any localized group

whose leaders are able to deliver the votes of their followers as a unit in return.

The presence at the center of government of power-holders of this type in turn reflects

a lack of supra-local categorical consciousness

among the electorate at large,

i.e. it reflects a state of mind in which

towns see themselves as being mainly in competition with other towns, and

unions see their main competitors to be other unions.

This new Italian pattern suggests that whether

a group operates in the polity (specific form or process of government)

in clientelist fashion or in a more modern fashion,

will depend upon the expectation of the organized and unorganized electorate.

The character of both, at a given point in time,

presumably reflect trait8 of political culture shared by

both members of the new dyad,

as well as the state of social and economic development.

Factionalism

The term factionalism is associated in particular with

competition between dyadic non corporate groups engaged in political rivalry

prior to the appearance of modern political parties in the West, and

is used today to denote groups which compete for dominance within the confines of a political

party. They tend to be characterized by unstable membership, uncertain duration, a lack of

formalorganization, anda greater concern with

power and spoils than with

ideology or policy.

When dyadic non corporate groups are in competition,

each group is commonly called a faction.Factional rivalry creates both conflict and a sense of community. In the course of such rivalry,

community-wide interest, and the legitimacy of community-wide offices, are affirmed and the

society is held more firmly together. One of the aims of each faction is to bring benefits to its

leaders and adherents. To do so it must defeat efforts or rival factions. The losers are likely to

be resentful and hope for revenge.

Dyadic relationships can be ones of mutual hostility, as well as of mutual aid. Injuries can be

exchanged as well as mutual favors.

Societies such as those in the Mediterranean region, which

place a high value on favoritism and give it form through dyadic alliance building often are

also described as societies characterized by strong feelings and expressions of distrust , envy

8Trait: convenio, acuerdo, pacto, contrato, negociacin, compromiso

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and vindictiveness9. Many such societies institutionalized the spirit of vengeance through the

development of clearly recognized rules concerning the right, duties, form and proper

participants in act of vengeance. Hostile reciprocity has organizational implications somewhat

more complex than those, which flow from reciprocity of a wholly benign sort.

Social Networks

Larger and more inclusive than dyadic relationships of dyadic non-corporate groups, are

social networks. Networks are defined as matrices of social links or as social fields made

up of relationships between people. Networks include all individuals who are not totally

isolated from each other, and serve as arenas for all of their interactions. According to J.A.

Barnes, the two fundamental properties of networks are:

multiple interconnections and

chain reactions.

A view of society as a network having these properties provides a useful approach to

understand some social processes that affect society as a whole. According to Land, forpurposes of network analysis, perhaps the more useful type of network to be analyzed, from

which both members as well as the analyst would profit,

is the realistically possible network,

which consists of

all links that individuals can realistically consider establishing given the impediments to

interaction imposed by space, time, social class, ethnic or familial hostility, and the varying

degrees of usefulness of individuals to each other.

This realistically possible network, reveals to an observer the probable lines of cooperation

and of conflict within that society, and this is of interest for its own sake.

It also serves as a useful background to examine

the actual network of dyadic interaction,

which consists of all dyads that actually have been established.

Network analysis highlights the basis of cohesion10 of societies.

It suggests how communities can be held together in the absence of strong governments of

organized groups.

Similarly it explains how class and other divisions within a society can be made tolerable be

the presence of cross-cutting alliances. And it helps to explain how consensus within a

community can emerge as the result of the result of the exchange of opinions among

individuals and how such consensus can contribute to the process of nation building.Social Networks, as macro-level combinations,

complete the survey of dyadic structures of different degrees of complexity and magnitude.

Their analysis are however peripheral to the micro and middle level structures of

the dyadic basis of clientelism and

therefore they will not be dealt with further here.

9Vindictive adjective having or showing a strong or unreasoning desire for revenge.

10Cohesin: adhesin, adherencia, enlace, unin, coherencia, congruencia, consistencia

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The Application of Dyadic Models to Political Analysis

The most obvious contributions which

dyadic, including clientelist modelscan make on group and class analysis

lie in

their ability to illuminate political behavior,which is inconsistent with, or

is not explained by

Marxist or non-Marxist class analysis.

There are three types of dyadic relationships

mentioned by J.A. Barnes

that are of particular interest.

They are relationships, which cut across1. group and categorical limits,

2. relationships within groups, and

3. relationships that are established in the absence of groups.

To this, one might,

ad relationships between individuals

so distant form each other

that they could not interact effectively

without the aid of a dyadic links.

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Concepts on Clientelism - Uni Bremen