This book, first published in 1988, is a study of clientelism in the south of Italy, its relationship with the mafia and its importance in the context of national politics. The book explains the existence of clientelism in modern societies and its relation to the distribution of public resources. It examines the growth of political consensus in the region and whether and where clientelism can be explained in the terms of the mafia. The title examines the relationship between local and national politics and the ideological aspects of clientelism in operation. It makes a detailed comparison of the developments of the Cristian Democratic and Socialist parties in Calabria. With its broad analysis of an important contemporary and historical phenomenon, this book is likely to be of interest to political scientists, historians, anthropologists and students of Italian politics.

This book, first published in 1988, is a study of clientelism in the south of Italy, its relationship with the mafia and its importance in the context of national politics. The book explains the existence of clientelism in modern societies and its relation to the distribution of public resources. It examines the growth of political consensus in the region and whether and where clientelism can be explained in the terms of the mafia. The title examines the relationship between local and national politics and the ideological aspects of clientelism in operation. It makes a detailed comparison of the developments of the Cristian Democratic and Socialist parties in Calabria. With its broad analysis of an important contemporary and historical phenomenon, this book is likely to be of interest to political scientists, historians, anthropologists and students of Italian politics.

The issue of patronage-clientelism has long been of interest in the social sciences. Based on long-term ethnographic research in southern Italy, this book examines the concept and practice of raccomandazione: the omnipresent social institution of using connections to get things done. Viewing the practice both from an indigenous perspective – as a morally ambivalent social fact – and considering it in light of the power relations that position southern Italy within the nesting relations of global Norths and Souths, it builds on and extends past scholarship to consider the nature of patronage in a contemporary society and its relationship to corruption.

This book, first published in 1988, is a study of clientelism in the south of Italy, its relationship with the mafia and its importance in the context of national politics. The book explains the existence of clientelism in modern societies and its relation to the distribution of public resources. It examines the growth of political consensus in the region and whether and where clientelism can be explained in the terms of the mafia. The title examines the relationship between local and national politics and the ideological aspects of clientelism in operation. It makes a detailed comparison of the developments of the Cristian Democratic and Socialist parties in Calabria. With its broad analysis of an important contemporary and historical phenomenon, this book is likely to be of interest to political scientists, historians, anthropologists and students of Italian politics.

Having won a two-third majority in Parliament at the 2010 elections, the Hungarian political party Fidesz removed many of the institutional obstacles of exerting power. Just like the party, the state itself was placed under the control of a single individual, who since then has applied the techniques used within his party to enforce submission and obedience onto society as a whole. In a new approach the author characterizes the system as the ?organized over-world?, the ?state employing mafia methods? and the ?adopted political family', applying these categories not as metaphors but elements of a coherent conceptual framework. The actions of the post-communist mafia state model are closely aligned with the interests of power and wealth concentrated in the hands of a small group of insiders. While the traditional mafia channeled wealth and economic players into its spheres of influence by means of direct coercion, the mafia state does the same by means of parliamentary legislation, legal prosecution, tax authority, police forces and secret service. The innovative conceptual framework of the book is important and timely not only for Hungary, but also for other post-communist countries subjected to autocratic rules. ÿ

This book examines the Italy of the 1980s, which represents an unparalleled example of dualistic development - deeply divided between North and South.

Past modernization literature has assumed that corruption and clientelism reflect a pre-modern social structure and could be referred to as a pathologic phenomenon of the political system. Very few have considered corruption and clientelism as structural products of an interwoven connection between capital accumulation, bureaucratic rationalization, interest intermediation and political participation from below. This volume analyzes key aspects of the debate such as: should corruption and clientelism be evaluated as a 'lubricant' in terms of administrative efficiency - legitimate demands from the margins of society to redress social and economic inequality or to readdress economic development? What would be the effect of strengthening policing to control political corruption? Could electoral reform or a decentralization of government power be a cure for all? These questions among others are answered in this comprehensive volume.

This wide-ranging book seeks to unravel the complexities of post-1992 Italian democracy. It takes as its point of departure the dramatic political tensions of the early 1990s and evaluates these against the background of an analysis of the ‘First Republic’ that predates these changes. Martin Bull and James Newell, renowned scholars of Italian Politics, argue that the early 1990s revolution in Italian party politics should be seen both as a major cause of subsequent changes in the political system and as a consequence of longer-term, still on-going changes in the Italian polity. The books explains how we can understand in this light the mixed success of the parties in attempting to act as autonomous vehicles of reform – and therefore why, if we are witnessing a transformation to a ‘Second Republic’, many of its key features still remain to be shaped. Each of the thematic chapters clearly juxtaposes Italy as it was before the 1990s with Italy today, thereby evaluating the degree to which the early 1990s can be seen as a watershed. In this way the book offers a novel account of both contemporary political developments and their historical significance in teh context of the ‘Italian political model’ that took shape in the period after 1945. This will be essential reading for all students of Italian and Comparative Politics, who will find the clarity and breadth of the book invaluable. Equally, scholars will be fascinated by this new and compelling argument.

This book charts the evolution of clientelist practices in several western European countries. Through the historical and comparative analysis of countries as diverse as Sweden and Greece, England and Spain, France and Italy, Iceland and the Netherlands, the authors study both the "supply-side" and the "demand-side" of clientelism. This approach contends that clientelism is a particular mix of particularism and universalism, in which interests are aggregated at the level of the individual and his family "particularism," but in which all interests can potentially find expression and accommodation in "universalism."

The second volume of the bestselling landmark work on the history of the modern state Writing in The Wall Street Journal, David Gress called Francis Fukuyama's Origins of Political Order "magisterial in its learning and admirably immodest in its ambition." In The New York Times Book Review, Michael Lind described the book as "a major achievement by one of the leading public intellectuals of our time." And in The Washington Post, Gerard DeGrott exclaimed "this is a book that will be remembered. Bring on volume two." Volume two is finally here, completing the most important work of political thought in at least a generation. Taking up the essential question of how societies develop strong, impersonal, and accountable political institutions, Fukuyama follows the story from the French Revolution to the so-called Arab Spring and the deep dysfunctions of contemporary American politics. He examines the effects of corruption on governance, and why some societies have been successful at rooting it out. He explores the different legacies of colonialism in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and offers a clear-eyed account of why some regions have thrived and developed more quickly than others. And he boldly reckons with the future of democracy in the face of a rising global middle class and entrenched political paralysis in the West. A sweeping, masterful account of the struggle to create a well-functioning modern state, Political Order and Political Decay is destined to be a classic.