Papal patronage has often been limited to the question of whether this or that pope loved art. Yet, the pontiff was only one of several actors involved in the realization of artistic projects symbolizing the Church’s cultural, religious, and political power. Papal patronage, in the sense of conflating the roles of initiator, commissioner, and financial backer, only came into its own after 800. At the same time, a long-lasting debate, rooted in the Classical discourse on luxuria and magnificentia, focused on the legitimacy of spending Church money on material beauty. This was resolved around 1500 when papal patronage became framed as magnificentia and charity, in line with the concept of “evergetism,” or collective service to society. This led to an active papal policy to use the arts, in conjunction with Counter Reformation visual propaganda, to strengthen the Faith, with an important impact on artistic developments primarily during the early modern period.

A vast scholarly literature addresses the question of why voters in certain electoral districts receive larger allocations of discretionary government resources than voters in others. When resource allocations are found to be positively correlated with electoral support for a ruling party across electoral districts, then it is presumed to favor core supporters. When resource allocations are found to be negatively correlated with support for a ruling party across electoral districts, then it is presumed to favor swing voters. The tournament theory offers an alternative explanation for why resource allocations can vary so substantially across electoral districts. When politicians use tournaments between the municipalities in their electoral districts to win elections, then across electoral districts, the size of a district’s resource allocation will be influenced by the relative sizes of municipalities therein. Moreover, this variable – district-level asymmetry – is expected to act on both electoral support and resource allocations: lowering lowers electoral support and increasing resource allocations. This chapter uses a host of regression specifications to test these two hypotheses using data from Japan, 1980–2014. In doing so, it provides an original account for why money is negatively correlated with support across electoral districts in Japan.

This chapter provides a short summary of the book’s contributions to comparative politics, political economy, and Japanese politics. Then, it sketches out a range of questions pertaining to different genres of research in political science, which future scholarship should address.

This chapter presents an overview of the book’s theory, empirics, and contributions to the study of Japanese politics. The theory is in two parts. First, I make the case that when politicians run for office in electoral districts divisible into groups of voters, from whom electoral support is discernible and to whom central government resources are deliverable, they can pull those groups into clientelistic exchanges, in which the amount of money groups receive is tied to how they vote. Second, I consider the nuts and bolts of how a politician can go about tying a group’s resource allocation to its electoral support. I elucidate one method that politicians in a dominant party will be able to use. The chapter then presents an overview of the empirical strategy used to test the theory, which uses regression analyses of original data on resource allocations and voting behavior in Japanese municipalities, 1980–2014, buttressed by qualitative evidence. Finally, the chapter presents a summary of the headline findings for scholars of Japanese politics. Ultimately, the book helps to account for why a single party, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), has been able to win almost every election in Japan.

Politicians in all democracies have goods to distribute, and they employ different modes of distribution to deliver them. They can offer voters goods in the hope those goods turn into votes. Alternatively, they can try to make the distribution of a good conditional on how someone votes. The latter mode is clientelism. I point out that the literature on clientelism has been preoccupied with the idea that politicians form clientelistic relationships with individuals. This has led to an intense scholarly focus on how politicians can consummate such vote buying deals to their satisfaction, given that the secret ballot prevents them from observing how people vote. I argue that under a certain configuration of political institutions, it makes sense for politicians to form clientelistic relationships with groups of voters. To do so, a politician’s electoral district must be divisible into groups of voters, at which electoral support is observable and to which resources are targetable. I take four longstanding questions of interest in the clientelism literature, concerning brokers, economic development, democratic integrity, and club goods and explain how the theory of group-based clientelism opens up new lines of inquiry in each.

This chapter evinces that the engagement of Spanish imperial officials with distant societies utterly foreign to them was only possible thanks to the clever use of their networks of patronage. Patrons, clients, and brokers played a vital role in shaping the officials’ activities. By looking at some of these networks from an imperial perspective, new light is shed on how the culture of bounty and clientelism, which was based on personal and local linkages, adapted to the global dynamics and new geographies, thus facilitating the government of the empire, even in regions thousands of miles away from the core of those networks. Furthermore, the chapter shows that royal service was a familial endeavor, including, of course, the wives. Although often contradictory, the networks, goals, and means of the officials’ kin and those of the monarchy were interwoven and became almost indistinguishable.

This chapter shows how a hierarchical organization and a dominant faction were crucial prerequisites for the strategy of instrumentalism. The union’s hierarchical structure enabled it to mobilize teachers in elections and a dominant faction enabled negotiations with political parties from across the ideological spectrum. The last section analyzes the political backlash against instrumentalism in 2013, which resulted in leadership turnover and policy changes that weakened the union overall. Despite this backlash, however, the union’s internal organization remained largely intact and union leaders continue to be ideologically flexible, in line with the main argument in this book.

Chapter 6 illustrates that household political cooperation begets a system of political organization that centers on men. Using network data from a census survey, it describes the structure of the overall village political network, including gender homophily of political ties, centrality in the entire network, and the average degree of connectivity between individuals and political elites. It shows that village political networks are structured such that men comprise the center of the network, while women remain on the periphery. As a result, influence is concentrated among men, and village politics is structured around men’s other intersecting identities, namely caste. It then compares the size and composition of women’s and men’s political networks and show that women are connected to village politics largely through the men in their household. For men, women do not register as political actors. Household political cooperation thus implies strong limits on women’s access to power, influence, and information and yields a broader gender and political system that perpetuates male dominance.

Chapter 4 brings the household into focus and demonstrates how it denies women political agency and constrains their political participation. Drawing on data from a census survey and interviews, it documents the alignment of the household in political decision-making and the authority of elder men in these decisions. It shows that women lack autonomy in their vote choice and are often coerced into compliance with the wishes of the heads of household. It further documents the inefficiency of household cooperation for women and demonstrate its perpetuation as rooted in coercion and strategic political mobilization.

This chapter uses a novel database on contractual arrangements between politicians, political brokers, and businessmen in Benin to investigate the way the nature of these arrangements depends on the level of political competition. We find that firms provide financial support to local and national politicians in exchange for policy concessions, direct budget support of firms, ‘favourable’ procurement auctions (bid-rigging), and various forms of state capture. In addition, while bid-rigging features constantly in politician–firm contracts, increased electoral uncertainty is associated with less demand for policy concessions and stronger preference for direct forms of state capture, that is, the appointment of firms’ agents or cronies to key government positions. In other words, electoral uncertainty could simultaneously contribute to democratic consolidation through political turnover, and to worse forms of corruption through state capture by business elites.

Modern states rely on the quality of their civil service. In the case of Tanzania, this chapter points to four key weaknesses: capacity, motivation and conduct, political interference, and resources and tools. Capacity and resources clearly depend on the level of economic development. From an institutional point of view, motivation and political interference play the most important role as they ultimately define the rules according to which the civil service, the political apparatus, and the private sector interact. The chapter maintains that the main factor behind these two weaknesses is the relationship betwwen civil servants and politicians, and recommends unplugging the civil service from political patronage through a transparent system of performance evaluation and promotion to senior positions, as well as a strengthening of the role and power of the Civil Service Commission. It also recognises that such a reform is unlikely to succeed unless supported by top politicians. While concurring with the need for this kind of reform, Jan Willem Gunning stresses in his comments the necessity to consider the political economy and the way in which compensation can be sought for losers.

To explain countries’ varying participation in the Belt and Road Initiative, this chapter begins with a discussion of recipient country characteristics that impact the demand for Chinese spending, including the political regime, clientelism, and the public-private orientation of the corporate sector. It then discusses the supply-side factors that influence Chinese foreign spending, including the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), state-owned entities (e.g., SOEs), and private firms. Finally, it evaluates the compatibility of these demand and supply characteristics. The key prediction is that electoral autocracies will display the strongest compatibility with Chinese foreign construction spending. This is amplified when the leaders of these regimes have a weak or insecure hold on power. Electoral autocracies are also predicted to be the most avid adopters of Chinese standards stemming from their eagerness for Chinese infrastructure spending.

This chapter establishes the empirical facts regarding political regimes and the prevalence of clientelism and the public-private orientation of the corporate sector. It begins by showing that electoral autocracies constitute around half of all developing countries during the 2010s, the most of any regime type. They are especially prevalent in Africa and Asia. The theory posits that clientelism plays an important role in driving Chinese foreign infrastructure spending. Several widely used proxies for clientelism establish that it is most prevalent in electoral autocracies. The theory also posits state control of the corporate sector is important to attracting Chinese foreign spending. A variety of measures are used to establish that state ownership of the corporate sector is significantly higher in autocracies than in democracies, especially in industries related to infrastructure. Overall, this chapter provides robust evidence about the characteristics of political regimes posited to influence Chinese infrastructure spending.