Media political clientelism: lessons from anthropology

http://mcs.sagepub.com/Media, Culture & Society

http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/30/1/41The online version of this article can be found at:

DOI: 10.1177/0163443707084349

2008 30: 41Media Culture SocietyNatalia Roudakova

political clientelism: lessons from anthropology−−Media

Published by:

http://www.sagepublications.com

can be found at:Media, Culture & SocietyAdditional services and information for

http://mcs.sagepub.com/cgi/alertsEmail Alerts:

http://mcs.sagepub.com/subscriptionsSubscriptions:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.navReprints:

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.navPermissions:

http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/30/1/41.refs.htmlCitations:

What is This?

- Feb 11, 2008Version of Record >>

at TEXAS SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY on September 30, 2014mcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from at TEXAS SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY on September 30, 2014mcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from

http://mcs.sagepub.com/

http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/30/1/41

http://www.sagepublications.com

http://mcs.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts

http://mcs.sagepub.com/subscriptions

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav

http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav

http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/30/1/41.refs.html

http://mcs.sagepub.com/content/30/1/41.full.pdf

http://online.sagepub.com/site/sphelp/vorhelp.xhtml



Media–political clientelism: lessons fromanthropology

Natalia RoudakovaUNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO, USA

With the publication of Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Mediaand Politics, the research program put forward by Daniel Hallin, Paolo Manciniand Stylianos Papathanassopoulos (Hallin and Mancini, 2004; Hallin andPapathanassopoulos, 2002) has captured the imagination of scholars in thefield of comparative media studies (see Josephi, 2005), giving many of themreal hope that studying media–political relations in the Third and formerSecond Worlds can be done without paying the necessary normative deferenceto the liberal model of media and politics, as understood to be found ‘natu-rally’ in English-speaking countries of the First World. This normativity hasfor the most part been taken for granted in comparative media studies, forcingscholars to frame their research questions primarily in terms of how well (orhow poorly) media–political relations in countries of the Third and formerSecond World measure up to this normative model. Through a careful analy-sis of media–political relations in a number of countries in the First Worlditself, Hallin and Mancini (2004) and Hallin and Papathanassopoulos (2002)argue that there is, in fact, great variation across the First World in the histor-ical and social processes that have shaped media–political institutions there,and that the liberal model is but one abstraction from those processes. Hallinand colleagues stress emphatically that their research program is empirical, notnormative; and that before making normative judgments, one needs a solidempirical understanding of the specific processes shaping media–politicalinstitutions in any particular locale under study. This article is a call to take thisresearch program seriously, and a demonstration of what doing so might entail.

Hallin and colleagues identify several analytical tools they found useful fortracing the historical and social development of the First World’s media–politicalinstitutions, suggesting that those tools might also be helpful to scholars of media

Media, Culture & Society © 2008 SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, NewDelhi and Singapore), Vol. 30(1): 41–59[ISSN: 0163-4437 DOI: 10.1177/0163443707084349]

at TEXAS SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY on September 30, 2014mcs.sagepub.comDownloaded from


and politics in much of the Third and former Second World (Hallin and Mancini,2004: 306). Among these tools, I will focus on the concept of media–politicalclientelism, which Hallin and colleagues borrow from comparative political science, and which seems to carry much promise for the broader project of de-Westernizing media studies, given the concept’s long-standing centrality toarguments about political structure and ‘political culture’ of non-Western locales.Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among political journalists in a specific non-First-World location (post-socialist Russia in the early 2000s), I will show howthe concept of media–political clientelism can be useful for illuminating someaspects of media–political relations there, while remaining rather limited (andlimiting) in understanding other aspects of those relations. Borrowing tools fromcultural anthropology, I will offer ideas why this is so, and suggest alternativeroutes toward a richer empirical and theoretical understanding of media–politicalrelations in Russia after socialism. In particular, I will trace how a specificunderstanding of ‘action’, ‘structure’ and ‘culture’ has nurtured clientelist modelsin comparative political science, contemplating what cultural anthropology – adiscipline which has radically revised its relation to culture and structure in thelast three decades – has to offer to comparative scholars of media and politics.

What is media–political clientelism?

Hallin and Mancini (2004: 58–9) and Hallin and Papathanassopoulos (2002:184–5) follow comparative political scientists in identifying clientelism as aform of social and political organization where access to public resources iscontrolled by powerful ‘patrons’ and is delivered to less powerful ‘clients’ inexchange for deference and other forms of service. Clientelism can thus be seenas a structural feature of societies where little or no separation exists betweenthe common good and the particularistic interest, or between public and private.Clientelism can also be seen as a cultural feature: a belief that formal, univer-salistic rules are less important than personal connections. The exact reverse is true in political science of clientelism’s analytical opposite, rational-legalauthority, defined as a form of socio-political order where access to publicresources is transparent, impersonal and merit-based, where the notion of thepublic good is strong, and where adherence to formal, universalistic rules ofprocedure overrides particularistic interests and personal connections. Rational-legal authority is understood to be what distinguishes institutions of politicalmodernity from their predecessors, with impartial civil service, autonomouslegal system and professional, autonomous journalism (the press as ‘the FourthEstate’) as prime examples of such institutions.

As can be seen from this introduction, it is possible to talk of clientelism bothhistorically and in a contemporary frame in political science: as an originalmechanism of ‘primordial’ social organization through which relations of powerand reciprocity used to be regulated prior to modernity (through kin, ethnic,religious and other forms of attachment); and as a contemporary response of

42 Media, Culture & Society 30(1)



social actors to political modernization, primarily in the Third World, wherethis process has often been accompanied by political uncertainty, economicscarcity and social unrest. Here, clientelism is seen as crucial to ‘the politicsof survival’ of both patrons and clients in newly volatile social and politicalcontexts (Günes-Ayata, 1994; Migdal, 1988).

Given the obvious historical and contemporary significance of clientelism,Hallin and colleagues argue, it is surprising that so little attention has been paidto it in media studies. One of the most important ways in which clientelismaffects the media, Hallin and colleagues suggest, is through instrumentaliza-tion of media outlets – the process whereby outlets’ owners and sponsors usethe media under their control to advance their particularistic interests. This isespecially true in volatile economic contexts where one’s position in business,for instance, is uncertain until one secures political backing by entering into aparticularistic alliance with a politician or by becoming a politician oneself.The same logic works for public office holders: in volatile political contexts,financial or industrial backing, particularly during election campaigns, is crucial to successful maintenance of political office.

Under such arrangements, ‘public opinion’ becomes a resource that ‘patrons’ –politicians, governors, oligarchs, financial tycoons – can use in the struggle toretain and augment their influence. Most commonly, patrons’ control over theoutlet’s editorial policy is manifested in expectations of positive publicity forthe patrons themselves and members of their network; and expectations ofnegative publicity for one’s opponents. Journalists working for instrumental-ized outlets end up being pulled into these clientelist orbits, with advocacyskills rather than neutral reporting taking center stage. Prominent journalistsbecome socially closer to politicians than to their rank-and-file colleagues;and media outlets end up servicing intra-elite communication needs ratherthan looking out for the public interest or the common good.

Press and politics in Russia in the 1990s: a case for clientelism?

Much of what Hallin and colleagues identify as media–political clientelismcan be usefully extended to describe the situation in post-Soviet Russia inthe 1990s and early 2000s. The ‘privatization’ of former socialist statesthroughout the 1990s led to a process whereby formerly central instrumentsand resources of governance became ‘up for grabs’ for multiple actors whohad had only a tangential relationship to the Soviet hierarchies of power(Koltsova, 2006; Verdery, 1996; Volkov, 2002). Throughout the 1990s, thesemultiple actors competed for control over state resources through participa-tion in privatization auctions, forced bankruptcies of former state enter-prises, elections to public office and other mechanisms of radical propertyredistribution. Control over the editorial content of news outlets became oneof the resources sought by these multiple actors as part of their political andeconomic weaponry.

Roudakova, Media–political clientelism 43



In their turn, newly private media outlets were unable to support them-selves through sales and commercial advertising, due to the profound eco-nomic crisis that ensued after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Instead ofclosing down and disbanding, outlets began to sell their advocacy skills tocompeting political-economic groups who sorely wanted them for reputationmanagement and electoral campaign success. In the city of Krasnodarsk,1

where I conducted fieldwork in 2001–2, for instance, there were at least foursuch groups of politicians and entrepreneurs, concentrated around the mayor,the governor, the head of regional parliament and the Presidential envoy to theregion. Each of these power groupings had come to own, sponsor or other-wise influence the editorial policy of at least one local broadcast station, onewire service, one radio station and several publishing houses. Correspondingly,these media groupings were informally known as ‘the mayor’s media hold-ing’, ‘the governor’s media holding’ and so on.

At first glance, this situation illustrates Hallin and colleagues’ proposedmodel of media–political clientelism very well. The inability of most post-Soviet media outlets to commercialize is an extremely important reason whyjournalists, publishers and broadcasters turn to powerful political and eco-nomic figures for financial support and patronage. Politicians and entrepre-neurs, in turn, realize that, without significant media weaponry, their politicaland economic future might turn out to be bleak. As politicians and entrepre-neurs consolidate their media resources, outlets become increasingly instru-mentalized, with advocacy skills rather than neutral reporting taking centerstage, and with horizontal affinities among journalists suffering at the expenseof vertical ties with media owners and sponsors. The conflicts and tensionsamong news outlets – the famed ‘information wars’, as they were known inRussia in the 1990s to early 2000s – become central to the political processitself, serving as a means of intra-elite, rather than mass communication.

Now let us consider what is left out of this picture. What we see through theclientelist lens is that journalists are building alliances with political-economicactors; but we cannot understand, given this optic, why many of those alliancesare fleeting, transitory or non-binding. The durability of clientelist loyalties isoften underscored in scholarship on clientelism (e.g. Eisenstadt and Roniger,1984: 48; Lemarchand and Legg, 1972: 152), yet in Russia in the 1990s andearly 2000s we encounter media outlets or individual journalists who, forinstance, might ‘service’ competing political-economic groups simultaneouslyor might frequently switch from one group to another. This may be donesecretly (individual journalists writing under pseudonyms), or openly, whenan outlet ‘retails’ its services to different political camps rather than sellingitself wholesale to any one of them. Such services might include productionof positive news about a political or economic actor; production of compro-mising information (kompromat) about the (paying) actor’s political enemies;or, even more commonly, the production of absence of negative informationabout the actor (see Koltsova, 2006: 108–17). Such arrangements for ‘retailing’




(rather than wholesaling) publicity are usually precarious and have a cleartime limit, for instance of one month, after which the arrangement, as well asthe price, have to be renegotiated. Despite such short horizons of action (orperhaps precisely because of them), at the height of information wars in the1990s and early 2000s, many outlets managed to use the situation to their advan-tage, successfully selling the absence of negative information, for instance, toa number of competing groups at once.

Next, the clientelist model presumes a certain level of vertical solidaritybetween a patron and a client; knowledge of what ‘the package deal’, struckbetween the two parties, entails; and a mutual obligation of both parties to follow through with their side of the deal. Again, in the context of media–political relations in post-Soviet Russia, these conditions are not always met.All too often, the money promised to journalists for partial coverage mightnever materialize (see Rubinov, 2005), or might be delivered late and insmaller amounts than promised, especially if the candidate who had orderedthe ‘electoral support’ package loses or is suddenly taken out of the race.Perhaps because of this uncertainty, when journalists do get their hands on achunk of electoral cash in advance (as when they formally join a campaignheadquarters, for instance), some of them surreptitiously sabotage their partof the deal with the politician – by inflating the price of their labor whiledelivering less, a practice known as raspilivanie (literally, ‘sawing off’ chunksof the campaign budget for personal use).

The voluntary character of patron–client ties is another feature that is oftenemphasized in clientelist literature; yet many alliances between journalistsand political actors in post-Soviet Russia have been coercive rather than vol-untary. Kompromat, for instance, can be simply forced onto journalists: whendiscrediting information about a ‘patron’ appears somewhere, the ‘patron’might want to reciprocate against his rivals in kind, ordering his media organ-ization to begin ‘a war of kompromats’ – a situation in which an entire mediaorganization is held hostage to an especially fierce round of political muscle-flexing (Koltsova, 2006: 107–8). Alternatively, media managers themselveshave been guilty of extortion, initiating kompromat about a political actor andthen forcing that actor to pay for its non-publication, or initiating kompromatagainst several actors at once and then pitting those actors against one another(see CJES, 2005; Kochetkov, 2005; Panfilov, 2005; Paniushkin, 2004).

What we encounter in Russia in the 1990s and early 2000s, then, is a situationwhere journalists do, indeed, depend on entrepreneurs and politicians financially,and where the latter are often successful in using the media to their own advan-tage. However, instead of durable, mutually binding ties developing betweenjournalists and politicians, as would be expected under the clientelist model, ‘therules of engagement’ between these two groups remain far from clear, whichgives them both the license to act toward one another in unexpected and at timesegregious ways. One could say, then, that the clientelist optic is helpful in paint-ing a broad-stroke picture of what the media–political nexus in post-Soviet




Russia looks like, but is less helpful for understanding what journalists andpoliticians actually do, why they to do it, what they want and why.

Why are these questions important? Because they identify a domain of inquirythat deals not only with the structure, but with the social significance of interac-tions taking place at the media–political nexus. The relationship between socialstructure, on the one hand, and social significance, meaning or ‘culture’, on theother, has been a complex one in the social sciences, and different disciplineshave offered different takes on it at various points in their histories. ‘Clientelism’is extremely interesting in this respect: in the tumultuous decades after decolo-nization, the concept was central to both anthropologists’ and political scientists’efforts to resolve the tension between ‘culture’ and ‘structure’ in reference to theThird World’s new political realities. It is worthwhile here to briefly recall clien-telism’s intellectual travels.

Clientelism: an ‘archaeology’ of the concept

As is well known, attention to clientelism in political science was spurred by anoutbreak of work in social anthropology in the late 1950s and 1960s focusingon patron–client relations in what was newly termed the Third or developingworld (Bailey, 1969; Boissevain, 1964; Foster, 1961; Sahlins, 1963; Weingrod,1968; Wolf, 1966). What is worth recalling about this particular body of liter-ature is that it emerged at a very specific moment in the history of anthropol-ogy: focus on patron–client relations (and, more widely, on power-brokerage,faction and coalition-building, political manipulation and submission, leader-ship and followership) signified a disciplinary rebellion against the dominantstructural-functionalist approaches to politics in anthropology (e.g. Fortes and Evans-Pritchard, 1940; Radcliffe-Brown, 1952), which demanded that ananthropologist go into the field to discover a stable, internally cohesive struc-ture or system undergirding all social interactions among a people or a tribe.Prescribed social roles and elaborate kinship arrangements were usuallythought of as elements in such a structure through which order and authoritywere maintained in ‘primitive’ societies, especially where no centralized formof government was to be found.

This is not to say that proponents of structural-functionalist anthropologyfailed to recognize that internal conflict, incongruity or other forms of social dis-equilibrium existed – they certainly did; but they also believed, together withother social scientists, that there is an underlying tendency toward stability, inter-nal cohesion and homeostasis that all societies exhibit, and that it is the job ofthe social scientist to uncover those tendencies. Anthropologists who came backfrom the field in the 1960s explicitly rejected this assumption of internal stabil-ity and cohesion of ‘more primitive’ societies, pointing instead to the conflicts,tensions and contradictions they observed in the Third World. Instead of locat-ing the political in ethnic, religious, kin, caste and other primordial structures or




arrangements, anthropologists began to draw attention to interpersonal and groupdynamics, to dyadic interactions and transactions that were taking place acrossand within those arrangements, as the people anthropologists were studyingacted to improve their material conditions, to accumulate resources, and to aug-ment their stature and influence at the expense of others. Suddenly, the ‘moreprimitive’ societies did not seem so primitive any more, as their politics began tolook more and more like Lasswell’s ‘politics as usual’. Not surprisingly, theanthropological understanding of ‘culture’ and ‘structure’ changed with thatshift: instead of being synonymous with structure, ‘culture’ began to be seen asan ongoing process through which human action reconfigures established struc-tures (Vincent, 1978).

It is at this unique moment that political scientists, themselves trying tocome to grips with the muddled political realities of the Third World, turned tothis disciplinary revolt in anthropology for both empirical data and theoreticalinspiration. The first generation of political scientists who did so (Lande, 1973;Lemarchand, 1972; Powell, 1970; Schmidt et al., 1977; Scott, 1972) sharedwith the anthropologists attention to micro-level detail, a focus on process, andon the specific social and historical circumstances that spurred people toaction. Following that moment, however, the two disciplines largely partedways. With the interpretive turn, ‘action’ in anthropology lost its unproblem-atic status and began to be seen as something that is produced at the intersec-tion of discourses and meanings, which are, in turn, made possible throughhuman action and interaction. The notion of culture as an open-ended processthrough which things, ideas, institutions, identities and action are mutuallyconstituted, or co-produced, was strengthened (Ortner, 1984).

In contrast to anthropology, the pendulum in comparative political scienceswung back to structural approaches to politics. The concept of a bounded‘political system’, which emerged already in the 1950s, soon took over‘process’ as the discipline’s central empirical object. The advantage of ‘sys-tem’ over ‘process’, as Gabriel Almond explained back in 1956, is that ‘sys-tem’ is a more rigorous concept, compared to amorphous ‘process’, implying‘a totality of relevant units, an interdependence between the interactions ofunits, and a certain stability in the interaction of these units’ (Almond, 1956:393). What anthropologists were increasingly ‘throwing together’ in theirfocus on process, then, comparative political scientists were painstakinglypulling apart into separate analytical levels. ‘Action’, ‘structure’ (institutionsor patterns of behavior) and ‘culture’ began to be thought of as distinct unitsthat made up political systems in different locales (Almond, 1956). Actionwas understood as what creates the political institutions and patterns that, inturn, compose the systems. In its turn, action was thought to be propelled byexisting ‘orientations to action’ that different individuals carry around withthem at any point in time. These orientations were thought of as largely psy-chological, and themselves made up of three components – perception, affectand value judgment (Parsons and Shils, 1951). It is these self-generated




orientations to action that, following Parsons, Almond and Verba (1963) andothers, began to count as ‘culture’ in political science.

Modernization theory, also gaining strength at the time, helped comparativepolitical scientists to refine their concept of political system. Modernizationtheory advanced the idea that, as societies grow more complex, various domainsof life become ever more differentiated from one another, emerging as sepa-rate ‘systems’ with their own logic. This allowed one to differentiate ‘politicalsystem’ from ‘the economy’, ‘the legal system’, ‘religion’, ‘kinship and fam-ily’ and so on. These different systems, in turn, were seen as themselves criss-crossed by meta-level divisions into state and society, and public and private,seen as the hallmarks of modernity. Bringing these two developments together,comparative scholars could imagine ‘total’ social space as a worldwide grid,one of whose axes contained divisions into ‘economy’, ‘politics’, ‘religion’,‘law’ and so on, regardless of their geographical location; while the other axisaccounted for national or cultural variation in how those domains lookedacross borders. Since those domains were still thought of as produced by dif-ferent types of action, one could, on the one hand, distinguish between ‘eco-nomic action’, ‘political action’, ‘legal action’, ‘religious action’ and so on; orone could study how ‘culture’ informed different ‘species’ of action in differ-ent locales, allowing one to speak of ‘political culture’, ‘legal culture’, ‘reli-gious culture’ and so on.

Under the influence of these developments, political scientists who retained aninterest in ‘clientelism’ (Eisenstadt and Roniger, 1980; Lande, 1983; Lemarchandand Legg, 1972; Roniger and Günes-Ayata, 1994) increasingly rethought it as astructural feature of political systems that have not been fully modernized – thatis, where the political and the social, or public and private, have not been fully dif-ferentiated. Correspondingly, these systems were seen as products of action that‘confused’ public and private, drawing on earlier, ‘primordial’ or cultural orien-tations rooted in ethnic, kin, religious, neighborhood and other loyalties. Thisframework made it possible for clientelism to be routinely joined by other unflat-tering concepts such as corruption, patrimonialism, favoritism, nepotism and thelike (e.g. Brinkerhoff and Goldsmith, 2002), all of which rely on the confusionbetween public and private for their definition.2

To recap, attention to ‘clientelism’ in anthropology and comparative poli-tics was spurred by a focus on the process through which the confines of ‘tra-ditional’ structures of authority in the Third World were seen as broken openin the tumultuous decades after decolonization. Under the pressure from dis-ciplinary generalists for structural rigor (see Pletsch, 1981), comparative polit-ical scientists increasingly rethought clientelism as a system or structure of itsown, conceptually coming full circle to where anthropology had begun. In con-trast, anthropology over the last three decades has moved further away fromstructuralism, which resulted in dropping ‘clientelism’ altogether. First, therehas been an assumption that social situations, at their core, do not exhibit anunderlying proclivity toward regularity, internal cohesion or homeostasis, but




are always situations of indeterminacy and incongruence (Moore, 1978). Fromwhich it follows that what we observe as regular, stable patterns of behaviorare better seen as people’s own attempts to control those situations of inde-terminacy, trying to give them form, order and predictability. This ‘folk’ processof ordering and regularization is not unlike social scientists’ own attempts toformalize social reality into categories and models: it is done ‘so that the indi-viduals involved can hold constant some of the factors with which they mustdeal’, and do not have to renegotiate ‘every instance and every interaction …in a totally open field of possibilities’ (Moore, 1978: 50).

This assumption of basic indeterminacy underlying all social situations hashad a profound effect on how ‘action’, ‘structure’and ‘culture’have been rethou-ght in anthropology. ‘Structures’ have been understood as localizable bundles ofpractices where specific groups of people succeed in holding some factors intheir environment constant. When such attempts fail, people are understoodto exploit indeterminacy to situational ends, connecting resources and dis-courses available to them from prior encounters and negotiating their com-plex meanings in specific circumstances not of their own choosing. ‘Action’or ‘agency’ has therefore been rethought as simultaneously a product of dis-courses and prior encounters and a perpetrator of new ones; and ‘culture’ hasbeen understood as the process through which people formulate action,exploit the uncertainty of their situations, separate their environment intomeaningful chunks, and discard those separations when they no longer fit.One thing that has become of particular empirical interest to anthropologistsin recent years is studying how, and under what specific conditions, certainbundles of practices are temporarily made into ‘stable’ and meaningful ‘struc-tures’, and how such stabilization might be reproduced or challenged. Theseare the directions of new work in the anthropology of the state, of liberalism,capitalism and democracy (e.g. Ferguson, 2006; Paley, 2002; Sharma andGupta, 2006; Yanagisako, 2002). With these developments in mind, let usconsider what the media–political nexus in post-Soviet Russia might look likethrough an anthropological lens.

Toward a post-structural analysis of media and politics

Just like the 1950s and 1960s, when ‘clientelism’ first emerged as a tool todeal with people’s responses to volatile environments of rapid decolonization,the 1990s in post-Soviet Russia was a period of prolonged social, politicaland economic turbulence, when social actors strove, and commonly failed, tohold elements of their environments constant, and journalists and politicianswere no exception to this process. The frenzied drive to ‘privatize’ former stateresources, as mentioned earlier, made election to all levels of governmentoffice a sought-after mechanism of radical property redistribution. Privatizationauctions had to be conducted, state contracts handed out, construction permits




given or denied, municipal buildings and land leased to someone – there werecountless ways in which having additional political weight improved, and inmany cases actually created, an entrepreneur’s chances to amass capital andto hold it down. While economic actors frantically looked for ways to increasetheir political weight, the economic crisis of the early 1990s wiped out mostmedia outlets’ chances to support themselves through sales and commercialadvertising, forcing them to rely on the precarious ebb and flow of campaignfunds to stay afloat.

In addition to political entrepreneurship and economic instability, anothersource of indeterminacy for media actors has been the moral ambiguity in themeaning of journalism after perestroika, rooted in the moral ambivalence ofpost-socialist transformation itself. As anthropologists have long insisted,property is not a relation between people and things, but a relation betweenpeople, so the introduction of private property into mass media has had amixed moral reception. Who are the new people calling the shots in the newera of post-Soviet journalism? How should they build their relations withjournalists and with one another? What does being an ‘owner’ or a ‘sponsor’of a media outlet mean, and does it have positive or negative moral connota-tions? Post-Soviet journalists found themselves faced with these questions,and with the dilemma of how to reconcile their answers to these questionswith other moral discourses available to them – the Enlightenment idea offree speech; the liberal discourse about journalists as government adversaries;and an earlier, Soviet-era notion of a journalist as a public intellectual whorelies on a finely cultivated moral ‘tuning fork’ inside oneself to formulatesocietal telos for others (Curry, 1990; Roudakova, n.d.; Wolfe, 2005).

Oftentimes, private media ownership has connoted positive morality forpost-Soviet journalists: the multiplicity of owners has meant that journalistshave a choice of who to work for, looking for the best outlet to ‘speak theirmind’. Or, in another positive way, private media ownership has meant therise of hard-working media executives completely and totally devoted to theirenterprise, committed to the outlet ‘making it’ on its own. Such relations ofownership have connoted a respect for journalists’ labor (including salariespaid on time) and an expectation on the part of the owner of a certain loyaltyto the media enterprise, a sense of ‘we are all in this together’. This has givenrise to discourses of ‘corporate ethics’, where ‘the corporation’ is not a hori-zontal professional unity of all journalists but the specific outlet for whichjournalists work, and to which they remain loyal by not airing its internal edi-torial conflicts (see Afanasieva, 2005; Varshavchik, 2005).

Yet, in other cases, private ownership of media outlets has had negativemoral overtones. In many cases politicians, owners and sponsors have simplyconsidered journalists their servants, forcing their political perspective – dictated by their financial interests – down journalists’ throats. All too oftenthis attitude has translated into a license to delay journalists’ salaries for weeksor months at a time, or to unexpectedly reduce them, under the pretense of




overcoming the outlet’s financial difficulties. This perspective has given rise toa discourse of respectability of state-owned outlets (Juskevits, 2002; Koltsova,2001: 80; Terekhova, 2003), where relations between journalists and govern-ment sources are seen as less likely to be mediated by money, and are there-fore seen as more ‘respectable’ or legitimate.

Parallel to the tension between journalistic moralities and forms of media own-ership, runs the uneasy relationship between money and information more broadly.While Soviet journalists, in one of my respondent’s words, were ‘brought up notto think about money’, the post-socialist moment pushed the question of moneyright into their faces. When most outlets are under continual pressure to survive,and when the only ‘market’ is one of political advertising, with distinctionsbetween advertisers, owners and sources routinely blurred, how does one deter-mine the monetary value of journalists’ labor, and the value of the media productitself? Who should pay whom, if at all, for obtaining, withholding or publicizingnegative or positive information about something or someone? Is a positive ornegative angle on a story about a candidate for a political office to be considered‘news’, or does it become ‘commercial content’during election campaigns, as theliteral reading of relevant legal codes demands? And if it is to be considered ‘com-mercial content’, should it be the media organization that decides on the substanceand the price of such content, or the candidates themselves?

In circumstances when journalists are routinely underpaid, additional ques-tions about the monetary value of their labor emerge. Do journalists owe theirlabor to anyone, or do they primarily work and fend for themselves, perceiv-ing their labor as a commodity for sale in the open market? Is the journalist tohave any say in how his or her labor is to be valued and measured? Do jour-nalists in staff positions have a right to expect a stable salary, or is piecemealpay to be considered ‘normal’? Should expectations of quality for piecemeallabor be any different, compared to salaried work? What about expectations ofloyalty? Pulling these threads together, how does the journalist square this all-too-real commodification of his or her labor with the broader moral discoursesabout journalism’s role and mission?

While some of these conditions feeding the indeterminacy of journalisticpractice are specific to post-socialism, others, I believe, are not so unique andcan be encountered elsewhere (of course, in other historical and cultural con-texts, other sources of indeterminacy might also exist, specific to those con-texts). Cataloguing these conditions, as I have just attempted to do, is animportant step toward an empirically richer, and more historically and cultur-ally grounded understanding of media–political processes in different locales,which is what Hallin and colleagues call for in their effort to ‘de-normativize’comparative media studies. Yet cataloguing these different discourses and ten-sions by themselves is not enough: we must pay attention to how social actorsconnect these discourses and negotiate their meanings in specific circum-stances, and whether and how these actions and practices ‘congeal’ into patternswhich, in turn, give an impression of stability and continuity to social situations.




In the specific contexts of post-Soviet Russia, it is difficult to speak of sucha stabilization effect, as late as the autumn of 2002: we are better off payingattention to the conditions which prevented or discouraged such stabilization.One such condition for the city of Krasnodarsk, where I conducted fieldwork,was the frequency with which that city of over a million would be thrown intomultiple rounds of political electioneering each year, and the fierceness withwhich electoral ‘battles without rules’ unfolded. For instance, between 1994and 1998 alone, 11 (!) rounds of local and regional elections had to be heldin Krasnodarsk, as contenders sabotaged one another to the point that someelections were cancelled on the eve of the election day, the results of otherswere pronounced invalid, one incumbent was dismissed by federal authori-ties, and some vacated their positions and moved on to other posts – all ofwhich meant that more elections had to be held, inviting new rounds of cam-paigning each year.

Journalists and media organizations were in the very center of those powerstruggles: sometimes as ‘weapons of choice’, bought by politicians ‘wholesale’,and sometimes as independent retailers of publicity. Often, this distinction didnot hold, when, for instance, a political actor bought an outlet with the expec-tation of free publicity, but failed consistently to pay journalists or lost interestin the outlet after a round of electioneering was over. In cases like this, or incases when an outlet was partially owned by a government branch and was sim-ilarly short-changed for funding, editorial collectives and individual journalistsbegan to ‘retail’ their services by circumventing the political interests of theirformal owners, returning to ‘wholesale’ mode when or if the flow of fundingfrom the owners returned to constant. Such back-and-forth shifting was madepossible by an unprecedented legal ambiguity created by the 1991 Law on thePress, which pronounced that editorial collectives were independent legal enti-ties, with a right to keep their own accounting vis-a-vis their external owners,which was done out of desire to protect press freedom not only from govern-ment officials, but from media owners themselves (Fedotov, 2002). In practice,this legal ambiguity translated into two things: an understanding among ownersthat media property was different from other property forms, in that the ownerwas under no obligation to bankroll journalists when they were not required;and an understanding among journalists that they were under no obligation tostay loyal to the owner as long as their salaries were paid haphazardly. Needlessto say, this legal ambiguity, together with the speed with which the political mapof the city, and hence the map of media ownership, kept changing, was anothercrucial factor that discouraged any ‘congealing’ of journalistic practices in the1990s and early 2000s into any stable structures.

Let me offer a brief example of these practices here, both on the level of amedia organization and an individual journalist. The organization in questionis the oldest daily newspaper in the city called Vechernyi Krasnodarsk(‘Evening Krasnodarsk’). During the Soviet years, it counted as the city’s ownevening paper, ‘supervised’ by the municipal branch of the Communist Party.




Once the post-Soviet Law on the Press was passed, the paper re-registereditself as co-owned by its editorial collective and the newly ‘secular’ munici-pal government, headed by the city’s mayor. The municipal budget wasstretched extremely thin during the early post-Soviet years, and although thepaper had its own line in that budget, journalists saw little in salaries fromtheir municipal co-owners. Relying on the above-mentioned clause in the newLaw on the Press, the editorial collective set up its own advertising depart-ment through which journalists began earning money on their own, particu-larly during election campaigns. However, substantial, campaign money wasnever enough to pay for all of the newspaper’s needs, so the paper continuedto rely both on municipal funds and on political advertisement to stay afloat.This required a fine balancing act on the part of editors and journalists, becausewho they advertised during the mayoral campaign had a direct bearing onhow their relations with the newly elected mayor would proceed.

During the mayoral elections of 1998, the newspaper signed a large adver-tising contract with one of the contenders for the mayoral seat, a notoriousbusinessman named Matvey Borovoy. The contract brought much-neededfunding into the newspaper, which made it possible, in the words of one jour-nalist, to pay employees’ salaries ‘twice a month, like clockwork’, in starkcomparison to previous months. No other contender for the mayor’s seat hadincorporated the popular newspaper into their campaign to the same extent;and perhaps because of this, or for other reasons, Borovoy won the mayoralelections outright, to everyone’s surprise. His notoriety (two convictions andone jail sentence) was suddenly deemed to disqualify him from being themayor of a major city, and, following pressure from Kremlin, local electionofficials cancelled the election results. A local court reopened one of Borovoy’sold cases and he was soon behind bars. A new mayoral campaign began, inwhich Vechernyi Krasnodarsk (VK) ‘sold itself left and right’ (‘prodavalsia sosvistom’) except to the contender named Yegor Avdeyev, who ended up actu-ally winning the elections. Apparently, Avdeyev had been expecting free elec-toral publicity from the newspaper but did not get it, and once he becamemayor, he retaliated by almost entirely cutting the newspaper off from the citybudget. This created an internal crisis in the newspaper, which a Norwegianmedia conglomerate took advantage of, successfully buying VK in 1999 andturning it into a profit-generating tabloid, changing its style, format and read-ership to such an extent as to make it unrecognizable as the same paper.

Svetlana Bulgakova, now in her late 30s, was one of the journalists whoworked in VK during the second half of the 1990s. She is known in the cityfor her poignant writing and her sharp tongue, and is respected by many ofher peers. She began working for the Soviet press in the late 1980s, whenjournalists’ desire to effect change and to ‘speak truth to power’ ran especiallyhigh, and over the 1990s she became one of the leading political journalistsin Krasnodarsk. In 1995 she went to the United States on a prestigious FreedomHouse internship for journalists, and in 2000 her column of political commentaries




from VK won the highest award from the Russian Union of Journalists, ‘TheGolden Quill’. Like most staff journalists during the 1997–8 electoral cyclein VK, Svetlana combined her work as a reporter with campaign consultancyand writing elsewhere. As (entrepreneur) Borovoy’s campaign was picking upspeed in VK, Svetlana was ‘moonlighting’ in the headquarters of another can-didate running for the Russian parliament at the time, covering city politicsfor VK during the day and writing election pamphlets at night.

When Yegor Avdeyev won the mayoral seat and cut the paper off from themunicipal budget, Svetlana, like others, found herself without salary threemonths in a row, contemplating what to do next. She happened to be friendswith Matvei Borovoy’s wife, who had proposed that Svetlana work as Borovoy’spress secretary while he was in jail. Svetlana agreed, justifying it to herself:‘I know everything about him anyway, we’ve discussed it in their kitchen somany times.’ Several months later Svetlana was married, had quit VK andwas working for a new publication edited by her husband. The publicationwas owned by a political-economic group that ended up in direct conflictwith Yegor Avdeyev – the mayor who had been delaying Svetlana’s salarymonths before. With no hesitation, Svetlana became the fiercest critic of themayor in the city, eventually contributing to Avdeyev’s losing the mayoralelections in 2002.

Situation-driven decisions and calculations like those of Svetlana, or likethose of her editors at VK, whose job was to constantly keep in mind the news-paper’s municipal funds, the amount and the price of political advertising, theline between free and paid-for electoral coverage, and the imperative of build-ing human relations with potential mayors – decisions and calculations likethese dominated post-Soviet media–political space in the 1990s and early2000s. In each and every case, these decisions were mediated by competingdiscourses about journalists’ role and mission, their immediate financial exi-gencies, and an understanding each of them had formulated for themselvesabout the link between information and money. In Svetlana’s case, forinstance, it would be difficult to single out one thing – ‘cultural’ or ‘structural’ –that propelled her in her scathing critiques of the mayor in 1999–2002. Rather,it was a combination of her personal resentment of the mayor; her news out-let’s editorial line, with strict rules for whom to praise and whom to criticize;her understanding of herself as a public intellectual with a right to make harshmoral judgments about a politician and his policies; and, last but not least, anunderstanding of journalists as government adversaries that she had broughtback from her Freedom House internship. It is the numerous actions and prac-tices of people like Svetlana that have been making up the media–politicalnexus in post-Soviet Russia, and, as late as autumn 2002, there was little sign,to my mind, that these practices had begun to congeal into stable structures orsystems of any sort. Now, changes in electoral law introduced under Putin inthe mid-2000s, which eliminate direct gubernatorial and in many cases may-oral elections, and which make it impossible for individual candidates to be




elected to Parliament unless they are on a party list that passes a 7 percentthreshold, might well be the foundation on which new media–political struc-turings will congeal. It is also possible, however, that the new law has intro-duced new sources of ambiguity, which media and political actors willcontinue to exploit to their situational ends.

Conclusion

In this article, I set out to evaluate the usefulness of media–political clientelismas a tool for the broader project of de-Westernizing media studies, asking whatcultural anthropology might contribute to this project. As I understand it,de-Westernizing media studies involves two things: first, greater attention to media–political processes in non-First-World locations and, second, a de-Westernization of media studies’ conceptual apparatus itself. Media–polit-ical clientelism has been proposed by Hallin and Mancini (2004) and Hallinand Papathanassopoulos (2002) as a tool that might help to achieve both ofthose goals. As I hope to have demonstrated with reference to post-Sovietmedia–political relations, the concept is useful only to some extent. Through aclientelist lens we do see that post-Soviet journalists and politicians are build-ing alliances and making compromises; but to assume that their relations arepart of a homeostatic media–political ‘system’ rooted in clientelist ties and loy-alties would, I think, be imputing to those relations a measure of coherence,stability and significance they do not necessarily possess.

Having emerged in anthropology and been picked up by political sciencein the 1950s and 1960s, ‘clientelism’ was originally intended to describe thebehavior of social actors in highly volatile conditions of rapid decolonizationand nation-building. As anthropology moved on to discard the concept,building indeterminacy into the heart of any social action, political sciencepicked it up, but bracketed indeterminacy as an external factor of the envi-ronment in which ‘clientelist’ action takes place, instead of treating it as acore component of the action itself. Clientelist action in political sciencebegan to be defined as that which mixes public and private, substituting the-orists’ analytical categories for the actual processes through which peoplemight formulate action.

The question, of course, remains whether the concept is indeed useful withreference to stable media–political systems as they are described in Hallin andPapathanassopoulos (2002) and Hallin and Mancini (2004), where the rules ofengagement between ‘patrons’ and ‘clients’ seem to have sedimented into pre-dictable patterns – the condition under which the idea of clientelism’s positiverole for democratic politics can be entertained (Hallin and Papathanassopoulos,2002: 176). In many other contexts in the Third and former Second Worlds,however, where political and social turbulence are the features of the day, wemight be better off focusing on the various processes through which discordant




media–political relations, identities and discourses are made and remade, andon the conditions that encourage or prevent bundles of those relations and prac-tices stabilizing into distinct institutions and patterns.

Lastly, post-structural tools from anthropology might help us de-Westernizemedia studies in yet another sense. By prying open the mundane and repetitiveactivities through which what is known as the normative liberal model of pressand politics is produced and reproduced, we might be able to estrange what fora long time has seemed familiar. After all, what we recognize as the normativerational-legal public emerges and congeals out of entirely localizable, concrete,‘private’, material and discordant sentiments, relations and practices. Payingcloser attention to those might tell us much we do not know.

Acknowledgments

Fieldwork for this study was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation forAnthropological Research. For a careful reading of an earlier draft of this article, Ithank Daniel Hallin, James Curran, Michael Schudson, Douglas Rogers, LiseMarken and Robert Samet. An earlier version of the article was presented at the‘Media and Political Clientelism’panel, International Communication Associationconference, Dresden, Germany, 22 June 2006.

Notes

1. Not the real name of the city. All of the names below, including the names ofmedia outlets, journalists and politicians, have been changed to protect respondents’anonymity.

2. (Neo)patrimonialism is conventionally defined as a form of government rulewhere the ruler treats the public domain entrusted to him as personal property (e.g.Theobald, 1982). Nepotism is allowing one’s private affinities rooted in family and kin-ship to encroach upon one’s public decision-making; and corruption is, famously,abuse of public office for private gain (World Bank definition, quoted in Wedel, 2002).

References

Afanasieva, E. (2005) ‘Etika i korporatsii’, URL (consulted July 2006): http://www.ej.ru/comments/entry/2601/

Almond, G.A. (1956) ‘Comparative Political Systems’, Journal of Politics 18(3): 391–409.Almond, G.A. and S. Verba (1963) The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and

Democracy in Five Nations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Bailey, F.G. (1969) Stratagems and Spoils: A Social Anthropology of Politics. Oxford:

Blackwell.Boissevain, J. (1964) ‘Factions, Parties, and Politics in a Maltese Village’, American

Anthropologist 66(6): 1275–87.Brinkerhoff, D.W. and A.A. Goldsmith (2002) ‘Clientelism, Patrimonialism, and

Democratic Governance: An Overview and Framework for Assessment and




Programming’, URL (consulted May 2006): http://www.abtassociates.com/reports/2002601089183_30950.pdf

CJES (2005) ‘Opasnaya professiya: Ezhenedelnyi bulleten’ sobytii v sredstvakhmassovoi informatsii Rossii’, URL (consulted August 2006): www.cjes.ru/bulletin/files/dang/2005/dang_rus_41.doc

Curry, J.L. (1990) Poland’s Journalists: Professionalism and Politics. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Eisenstadt, S.N. and L. Roniger (1980) ‘Patron–Client Relations as a Model of Structuring Social Exchange’, Comparative Studies in Society and History22(1): 42–77.

Eisenstadt, S.N. and L. Roniger (eds) (1984) Patrons, Clients, and Friends: InterpersonalRelations and the Structure of Trust in Society. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Fedotov, M. (2002) Pravovye osnovy zhurnalistiki. Moscow: Vlados.Ferguson, J. (2006) Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham,

NC: Duke University Press.Fortes, M. and E.E. Evans-Pritchard (eds) (1940) African Political Systems. Oxford:

Oxford University Press.Foster, G. (1961) ‘The Dyadic Contract: A Model for the Social Structure of a

Mexican Peasant Village’, American Anthropologist 63: 1173–92.Günes-Ayata, A. (1994) ‘Clientelism: Premodern, Modern, Postmodern’, pp. 19–28

in L. Roniger and A. Günes-Ayata (eds) Democracy, Clientelism, and Civil Society.Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Hallin, D. and P. Mancini (2004) Comparing Media Systems: Three Models of Mediaand Politics. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Hallin, D. and S. Papathanassopoulos (2002) ‘Political Clientelism and the Media:Southern Europe and Latin America in Comparative Perspective’, Media, Culture &Society 24: 175–95.

Josephi, B. (2005) ‘Journalism in the Global Age: Between Normative and Empirical’,Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies 67(6): 575–90.

Juskevits, S. (2002) ‘Professional Roles of Russian Journalists at the End of the1990s: A Case Study of St Petersburg Media’, URL (consulted July 2006):http://tutkielmat.uta.fi/pdf/lisuri00006.pdf

Kochetkov, V. (2005) ‘Samym izvestnym chelovekom, udachno prodavshim kompro-mat, byl Ostap Bender’, URL (consulted May 2006): http://www.smi-nn.ru/?id=51071

Koltsova, O. (2001) ‘News Production in Contemporary Russia: Practices of Power’,European Journal of Communication 16(3): 315–35.

Koltsova, O. (2006) News Media and Power in Russia. London: Routledge.Lande, C. (1973) ‘Networks and Groups in Southeast Asia: Some Observations on the

Group Theory of Politics’, American Political Science Review 67(1): 103–27.Lande, C. (1983) ‘Political Clientelism in Political Studies: Retrospect and

Prospects’, International Political Science Review 4(4): 435–54.Lemarchand, R. (1972) ‘Political Clientelism and Ethnicity in Tropical Africa:

Competing Solidarities in Nation-Building’, American Political Science Review66(1): 68–90.

Lemarchand, R. and K. Legg (1972) ‘Political Clientelism and Development: APreliminary Analysis’, Comparative Politics 4(2): 149–78.

Migdal, J.S. (1988) Strong Societies and Weak States: State–Society Relations andState Capabilities in the Third World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Moore, S.F. (1978) ‘Uncertainties in Situations, Indeterminacies in Culture’,pp. 32–53 in Law as Process: An Anthropological Approach. Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press.




Ortner, S. (1984) ‘Theory in Anthropology Since the Sixties’, Comparative Studies inSociety and History 26: 126–66.

Paley, J. (2002) ‘Toward an Anthropology of Democracy’, Annual Review ofAnthropology 31: 469–96.

Panfilov, O. (2005) ‘Eta beda sokhranitsia do tekh por, poka v Rossii budet sushch-estvovat’ dikii rynok SMI’, URL (consulted August 2006): http://www.smi-nn.ru/?id=51070

Paniushkin, V. (2004) ‘Komu ne nuzhen PR’, URL (consulted August 2006):http://www.gazeta.ru/column/panushkin/158162.shtml

Parsons, T. and E.A. Shils (eds) (1951) Toward a General Theory of Action.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Pletsch, C. (1981) ‘The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa1950–1975’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 23: 565–90.

Powell, J.D. (1970) ‘Peasant Society and Clientelist Politics’, American PoliticalScience Review 64(2): 411–25.

Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. (1952) Structure and Function in Primitive Society. London:Cohen and West.

Roniger, L. and A. Günes-Ayata (eds) (1994) Democracy, Clientelism, and CivilSociety. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner.

Roudakova, N. (n.d.) ‘Ethics and Politics of Responsibility in Soviet Journalism’,unpublished manuscript.

Rubinov, A. (2005) ‘Bez zarplaty’, URL (consulted May 2006): http://www.journal-ist-virt.ru/2005/9/54.php

Sahlins, M.D. (1963) ‘Poor Man, Rich Man, Big-Man, Chief: Political Types in Melanesia and Polynesia’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 5(3): 285–303.

Schmidt, S.W., J.C. Scott, C. Lande and L. Guasti (eds) (1977) Friends, Followersand Factions: A Reader in Political Clientelism. Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress.

Scott, J.C. (1972) ‘Patron–Client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia’,American Political Science Review 66(1): 91–113.

Sharma, A. and A. Gupta (eds) (2006) The Anthropology of the State: A Reader.Oxford: Blackwell.

Terekhova, E. (2003) ‘Ya za vliyanie vlasti na redaktsionnuyu politiku SMI’, URL(consulted August 2006): http://www.smi-nn.ru/?id=15829

Theobald, R. (1982) ‘Patrimonialism’, World Politics 34(4): 548–59.Varshavchik, S. (2005) ‘Internat dlia sirot’, URL (consulted June 2006):

http://www.ng.ru/politics/2005-11-30/3_internat.htmlVerdery, K. (1996) What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press.Vincent, J. (1978) ‘Political Anthropology: Manipulative Strategies’, Annual Review

of Anthropology 7: 175–94.Volkov, V. (2002) Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian

Capitalism. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Wedel, J. (2002) ‘Blurring the Boundaries of the State–Private Divide: Implications for

Corruption’, paper presented at the European Association of Social Anthropologists(EASA) Conference in Copenhagen, 14–17 August.

Weingrod, A. (1968) ‘Patrons, Patronage, and Political Parties’, Comparative Studiesin Society and History 10: 377–400.

Wolf, E. (1966) ‘Kinship, Friendship, and Patron–Client Relations in ComplexSocieties’, pp. 1–22 in M. Banton (ed.) The Social Anthropology of ComplexSocieties. London: Tavistock.




Wolfe, T.C. (2005) Governing Soviet Journalism: Press and Power after Stalin.Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Yanagisako, S. (2002) Producing Culture and Capital: Family Firms in Italy.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Natalia Roudakova is a lecturer at the Department of Communication,University of California San Diego. She holds a PhD in Cultural and SocialAnthropology from Stanford University, USA. Her dissertation is an ethnographyof the media–political transformation in post-Soviet Russia. Her research interestsare in the cultural production of media–political action, and in the anthropologyof liberalism and secularism and its implications for journalism ethics. Address:Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego, 9500Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093-0503. [email: [email protected]]




Documents

Media political clientelism: lessons from anthropology