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Public administration research and theory has undergone a fundamental change, unlike any other area in political science. Six fundamental assumptions of public administration have been challenged during this transformation: the assumptions of bureaucratic self‐sufficiency, direct control, uniformity, accountability, standardization of procedure, and an apolitical service. These assumptions have been challenged as ‘new managerialism’, ‘new patrimonalism’, and ‘new fragmentation’ have superseded thinking about public administration.

This chapter focuses on the dominant political economy models that try to explain the relation between markets and states in Europe's early modern economies. Placed into the context of Spanish history, some of the main assumptions of the model turn out to be highly problematic and in urgent need of revision. A lopsided focus on the state as predator has distracted economists and economic historians from trying to understand better how states became jurisdictionally and economically integrated units in the first place. The void has been filled by a number of poorly historicized references to concepts borrowed from historians and historical sociologists such as “absolutism” and “patrimonialism.” These concepts were supposed to delineate the development of European states from fragmented sovereignty to unified nation-states.

This introductory chapter discusses the relations between the Sui and Tang Empires and the surrounding Turko-Mongol pastoral nomadic peoples during the medieval period (580–800 ad). It explains the method and theory used in the present study and studies the China-Inner Asia relations, where it introduces the term “Chinese worldview.” The final part of the chapter discusses several concepts that are included in the following chapters, such as patrimonialism, the China-Inner Asia borderlands, and Sui-Tang cosmopolitanism.

This chapter examines Turko-Mongol khanates and introduces a cosmopolitan type of patrimonialism. It takes a look at local society during the North China rebellions, the Sui-Tang imperial palaces, and the Tang bureaucracy and frontier military. This chapter reveals that the contrasting elements of society were combined together politically by patrimonial rulership, horizontal alliances, and vertical patron-client relationships in the Sui, Tang, and Turk empires.

This chapter develops a concept of agency through which to study power and thereby mobilize the vocabulary proposed in the previous chapter (rector, actor, other). Agency is defined as the ability to send an agent into the world and bind said agent to act on behalf of the sender. This concept is developed via a careful interpretation of the work of the sociologist Julia Adams, whose work on principal-agent theory provided the definitive breakthrough to a new theory of culture and power. It also discusses the concept of "project" at length, relating it to pragmatist action theory, as well as to the work of Simone de Beauvoir. In provides a brief, retrospective rendering of the concerns of Karl Marx and Max Weber in terms of agency theory as well. The chapter proposes a fundamental distinction between action and agency – two terms that are often conflated in sociology. Action is universal – it is what all humans do as they move through the world. Agency is highly variable, and subject to construction and reconstruction in particular ways. The process of sending and binding an agent gives both order and dynamism to action in the world.

This chapter looks in detail at patrimonialism and personalization in the Stalin period. It also looks at the structure of top party institutions, party personnel allocation, and the Bolshevik elite's self-representation as leaders. It illustrates that the leading bodies of the party were always ephemeral collections of personalities that never developed a rule-bound institutionalization that would allow institutions to project their rules, procedures, and authority onto senior political actors or determine their behavior. The chapter also shows how patrimonialism and personalized power consistently won over “modern” functioning, quite aside from the considerable influence of Stalin's personality.

This chapter examines in detail the difference between the grandees upstairs and the TsK staff downstairs. The difference in view between the upstairs grandees and the downstairs staff reflects, in microcosm, the difference between rational bureaucratic authority and traditional patrimonialism. The staff wanted rational bureaucracy. The elite wanted patrimonialism, with all its arbitrary flexibility. The chapter asks: what was the result of this mismatch and who won?

Patrimonialism permeated Russian and Soviet cultures in a profound way. Patrimonialism won over bureaucracy, as the last chapter showed. This chapter shows that it came with a price: conflicts and political clans. Patrimonialism permeated the entire Bolshevik party. On all levels, party members thought of themselves as some version of the elect, the privileged. Party members regarded themselves as natural leaders. In the absence of countervailing institutions, such groups rapidly developed into cliques and patron-client groups. If there was more than one strong personality in the locality, a power struggle would erupt.

This chapter discusses whether Central Asian authoritarianism can be viewed in some way as a legacy of empire, while accepting that many other factors have contributed to the emergence of the present political systems that dominate the region. The historical legacy of empire, particularly that form of empire seen in the Soviet period in Central Asia, has contributed to the emergence of authoritarian political systems in two important ways. First, the nature of sovereignty that emerged in the post-Soviet period in Central Asia owes much to the attitudes of Soviet-era national elites towards the borders of the Soviet republics in Central Asia, which emerged partly as a result of deep involvement in the bureaucratic politics of resources in the Soviet period. This, in turn, contributed to the emergence of a type of authoritarian regime that reflected this particular understanding of sovereignty. Second, the nature of authoritarianism in Central Asia — its neo-patrimonialism in particular — stems in part from the informal structures of social organizations and resource distribution that developed in Soviet Central Asia in the 1970s and 1980s. To a certain extent these mirrored political and social developments in other parts of the Soviet Union, but in Central Asia they were framed within a particular discourse about ethnicity and a state system which, despite its anti-imperial rhetoric, was often characterized by colonial principles and discourses. In this sense, authoritarianism in Central Asia becomes more comprehensible when viewed through a post-colonial lens.

This chapter introduces the book as a whole. It outlines the argument and provides an alternative explanation to Angola’s post-war state and nation-building exercise. Behind the Presidency and the MPLA was a large securitized machinery that provided the institutional, psychological and functional backbone of political control and centralized power. This book will analyze each of these elements of the security apparatus highlighting an area that has seldom received any analytical treatment in Angola’s peacetime literature. It will argue that Angola reinvented its path towards peace and development through the shadowing of power in parallel institutions upheld by intrusive and far-reaching security agencies and policies. The post-war political order centralized power in the Presidency and shielded it from extraneous forces (the ruling elites, the opposition and the people). This chapter also introduces a new perspective on securitization theory.

This and the next chapter outline the book’s theoretical model for the conceptualization of sectarian identity. It will be argued that sectarian identity simultaneously operates and is imagined on four interdependent, mutually informing and reinforcing dimensions: doctrinal, subnational, national and transnational. Rather than four separate phenomena, these dimensions are four sides of one thing: sectarian identity. This model sharpens our analysis by emphasizing the inherent multidimensionality of sectarian identity and by enabling us to identify which aspect of sectarian identity is relevant to a given situation. This allows us to better match the correct analytical tools and the appropriate bodies of literature to meet the needs of a given context. IR theory is useful for understanding sectarian dynamics at the transnational level but is useless at the doctrinal level; critical race theory is useful for the subnational level but not the national level etc. The model also highlights sectarian identity’s intersection with other variables such as class, tribe, patronage networks, economic distribution and the like. This chapter explains the model and examines three dimensions: doctrinal (sectarian identity as it relates to doctrine/religious truths); subnational (sectarian identity within a given national setting); transnational (sectarian identity in international relations and geostrategic competition).

This chapter examines the concealed trajectories of internal slavery in the Senegal River Valley. In particular, it looks at the endogenous trajectories of upward mobility among the slaves of a number of Almaami and the impact of new trajectories, inspired by colonial abolitionist ideology (for example, the military and school-teaching), on internal emancipation trajectories. The chapter first discusses Islamic patronage and pre-colonial emancipation in the Senegal River Valley, focusing on patrimonialism, clientelism, and the integration of slaves into the rural poor. It then examines how the ex-slaves' relationships with ex-masters and freemen in general influenced the relative strength of the stigma attached to slave status. A slave's social mobility was determined by the maintenance and renegotiation of dependence. The chapter also considers the transformation of slave–master relations into patron–client relations.

Since 2000 the objective of the Ministry of SOEs has been to transform SOEs from being bloated, inefficient, resource-absorbing behemoths that encourage unbridled corruption, into becoming significant contributors to the Indonesian economy. Since 2014, SOEs have been a key plank in the government’s infrastructure and development strategy. The historical legacy that governed the establishment of SOEs, and bestowed political privileges on them, resulted in the emergence of powerful constituencies with vested interests aligned with the political structure of the Indonesian State. Despite many efforts at opening up the economy since the early 1980s, Indonesia’s developmental ethos has still continued to be dominated by highly nationalistic state-led development attitudes and priorities with a consequent reluctance to cede State ownership/control of key state assets and enterprises.

This chapter proposes an analysis of the social space inhabited by the CEOs and chairpersons of the top 100 Indian companies in 2012, using a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA). The analysis aims to understand the internal divisions to be found in the field of economic power, by looking at the divisions along the lines of educational capital, inherited capital (family capital), caste and social capital (drawing on a network analysis of interlocking directorates). Our results point to a very peculiar structuration of the economic field: we find that credentialism has a very weak influence; there is a clear and massive cleavage between owners and managers of capital; social capital carries decisive weight; and the actors closest to the State apparatus occupy a marginal role. We argue that it is possible to identify three poles among business leaders: the multipositional family-business owners, the unipositional family-business owners, and the managerial galaxy.

This chapter places the study of regime personalisation in Russia in a theoretical and comparative context. It draws from literatures on personalism and neopatrimonialism to develop a novel perspective that is primarily empirically driven, concerned with the detection of personalism in real-life political settings. Because the ruler's concentration of power is largely unknowable, scholars need to detect its implications for power relations within the ruling coalition, that occur as part of the process of regime personalisation. Personalisation can be studied indirectly, by observing changes on four pillars of personalisation: patronage personalisation, deinstitutionalisation, media personalisation, and permanency in office. Personalisation is the process through which the perception of the ruler as indispensable, irreplaceable, and most powerful actor is reinforced, through personal control over the most important institutional and elite segments of the ruling coalition. This is achieved primarily by relying on informal patronage networks and regime deinstitutionalisation. The perception of single leadership is further reinforced when the ruler’s public image dominates other actors individually and collectively. In the extreme, this dominance acquires the characteristics of a cult of personality. Another important aspect is that the person of the leader will be perceived as permanent in office, even irrespective of the office such person occupies. This chapter includes schematic representations of low and high values on the four pillars of personalisation. By assessing change on four pillars over time, one can tentatively distinguish between three stages of personalisation.

A key aspect of the colonial state was a geo-political dualism of space in which settlers occupied the rich agricultural plain and urban centres while Algerian peasants inhabited the communes mixtes, the forests and mountains of the interior. After the First World War the caids, the traditional élites that governed the peasants through indirect rule and patron-client relations, entered a crisis of legitimacy and were challenged by communist and nationalist movements. Marxists and historians have tended to perceive the peasants as lacking in political consciousness, incapable of organized resistance, but a new social history, by restoring agency to the lowest strata of the colonized, demonstrates that they assumed a key role in the long-term move towards insurrection. Contrary to the conventional interpretation of rural revolution as a movement initiated by a vanguard party of urban militants, the nationalists adapted to, and built upon, the traditional social and political structures of the peasant community, including the village assemblies. The colonial state largely failed in its attempts to cut the root cause of rebellion through economic modernization of the peasant economy. After 1956 the French launched Opération Pilote, a massive counterinsurgent experiment that deployed anthropology and psychological warfare, but signally failed to contain an insurrection that was embedded within the family, kin, and associational structures of rural society.

In the dualism of colonial space, the peasantry massed in the interior were governed by a system of indirect rule, that of the communes mixtes (CM), in which a European administrator depended on a team of caids, neo-tribal chiefs, to police and manage the inhabitants of the douars. The caids, assisted by the village headmen (kebirs) were responsible for maintaining civil registers, collecting taxes, policing, and providing a flow of information to the intelligence state. A case study of the CM of the Chelif explores the important role of an aristocratic élite, the powerful Saiah family, to show how the caidat politically dominated rural society through patron-client relations and religious, charismatic power. The central government Native Affairs department managed the CM zones through supporting such clan-like, conservative élites, but by the 1930s the basis of patrimonial power was entering a phase of deepening crisis that undermined the system of indirect rule.

The chapter considers the deficiencies of many current studies of African Christianity, because they ignore the profound diversity between those Christians who operate with an enchanted religious imagination and those who do not. This book will outline the differences between the two by comparing examples of the two types, taking Pentecostalism (in a broad sense) as an example of enchanted Christianity and Roman Catholicism as an example of non-enchanted Christianity. The chapter also outlines the method used in the book.