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This chapter describes Bhat relationships to the ritualized village patron-client “gift” economy found throughout northern India called jajmani. It is shown that the Bhats’ skill as bards, and their perspectives on caste relations more generally, emerge from the manner in which this social economy places value on exchanges between patrons and clients. In particular, this chapter explores Bhat understandings of virtue, and thus also of caste hierarchy, through a consideration of Bhat praise- and insult-poems which celebrate gifting and generosity. It is argued that views of caste emphasizing the importance of patronage and kingship — as opposed to purity, pollution, and priesthood — better explain Bhat relations to the Indian institution of caste.

This chapter discusses the emergence of a new form of patronage politics under the Putin presidency. Patronage politics is not limited to the political appointees who serve at the pleasure of elected leaders, often as senior staff members or management cadres in the core executive. Elected officials, permanent civil servants, and leaders of business and non-government organizations are also subject to a spoils system that allows federal and regional leaders to influence personnel decisions in ways that endanger political pluralism.

This chapter examines Athanasius’ presentation of the ‘Eusebians’ in action, particularly in the Historia Arianorum and the other works of his third exile (356-62). Those actions include the writing of letters; the manipulation of ecclesiastical patronage (notably in the alleged purge of ‘orthodox’ bishops in the years after the Council of Nicaea); the dependence upon secular power through the support of local officials and the Emperor Constantius; and the violence and persecution that the ‘Arians’ are alleged to have caused in Alexandria and Egypt.

This chapter outlines the process by which clergy were secured appointment to parishes. It discusses the complex identities and roles of curates, and their financial position, and suggests that they were not a depressed underclass. It examines the practise of patronage, describing who exercised it, how it worked, the significance or not of political influence, and the influence of the parishioners. Numerous examples are provided of how clergy set out to seek preferment, and of the expenses involved in being presented to a parish.

This book has looked at women belonging to and living under medieval Islamic dynasties by comprehensively covering women under the Fatimid dynasty. To this dynasty were linked those women who, on account of the power they commanded, were to become among the most famous female personalities of the medieval Islamic world: Sitt al-Mulk, the Sulayhid queens of the Yemen and the mother of the imam-caliph al-Mustansir. Court women marked their status and influence by way of grand-scale architectural patronage for the use of propaganda. The Fatimids were forerunners in the practice of frequently appointing heirs as children born of concubines rather than those born of wives. Being culturally and doctrinally ‘foreigners’ themselves in the regions they ruled, the imam-caliphs encouraged diversity when, for instance, appointing Berbers and Turks, Christians and Jews as their viziers, secretaries and military commanders. Another focus of this book has been the interconnectedness between Fatimids, women and trade.

In Malaya and India, the British devised a system of indirect rule whereby they relied on local norms, social organizations, and indigenous institutions of authority such as landlords and sultans who managed the daily lives of their subjects but were controlled by the British through treaties. Both the colonial states used patronage to rule, creating dependencies between local authorities and the colonial state, and also creating economic, legal, and social structures that, along with the patronage, divided the society vertically.

Formerly, the principles of delegation and accountability were poorly developed within this system, because the logic of Iceland’s patronage system embedded political relationships in a social system of mutual exchange and favours. This has changed over time as society has become more pluralistic and corporatism, which allows interest groups to dominate decision-making in some areas, has developed. Open primaries have eliminated safe seats and have made individual MPs more directly accountable to voters. Open primaries limit party discipline with regard to electoral opportunities, but political parties still can exert control over individual MPs using campaign finance.

The 1949 (West) German Basic Law established a system of party‐based democracy that has now endured for more than half a century, yet today's political system is not identical to that of earlier years. Since the beginning of the 1980s, new party alternatives have made coalition politics harder to manage, the established parties have lost votes and members, and waning public support for all the parties has drawn unfavourab1e attention to the parties’ entrenched positions. These changes grew more pronounced in the 1990s, exacerbated, though not caused, by German unification, and developments reached a new stage in 1998, when one of the new parties of the 1980s, the Greens, became a party of government—an event made possible at least as much by the transformation of the Green Party itself as by a revolution in German politics. Nevertheless, despite the recent challenges to traditional political patterns, Germany remains very much a parties state, with parties still serving as the central mechanisms for political linkage and political decision‐making, and the same big parties being the principal players in state and federal coalition politics. The introductory sections discuss German parties and political institutions; the next three sections cover the same topics as the other country case studies in the book, and examine party legitimacy, party organizational strength (finance, staffing, members, mass media, parties in eastern Germany), and party functionality (in governance, interest articulation and aggregation, political participation, political recruitment and patronage, and political communication and education).

Spain has made a number of experiments with democracy, but only since the mid‐1970s has this been successful. At that time, strenuous efforts were made to ensure that political parties would come forward, and as a result the new democracy had two key aspects: the creation of synthetic parties (in the sense that they are supported more from above than below), and the building of a parties state. The introductory part of the chapter discusses these changes and also has a section looking at the institutional framework that had such a shaping effect on party politics; this discusses the electoral system, and the rules governing parliamentary group organization and party finance. The next three sections cover the same topics as those in the other country case studies in the book, and examine party legitimacy (party membership, electoral turnout and volatility, popular assessments, party–voter ties, and evaluating party legitimacy), party organizational strength (parliamentary party organization, mass party organization, party finance, ‘goods in kind’ received by parties, and evaluating party organizational strength), and the systemic functionality of parties (governance, political recruitment and patronage, interest articulation and aggregation, political participation, political communication and education, and evaluating the systemic functionality of parties). The concluding section assesses the viability of Spain's parties state and gives a comparative analysis of its experience of democracy.

Blondel approaches the question of party decline by asking to what extent it is a product of semi‐legal or illegal practices adopted by parties. At first glance it seems that the answer should be positive—the discovery of corruption or the distribution of favours by parties has made them the target of mass media attacks that have fed into increasing citizen dissatisfaction with or disaffection from parties; Blondel, however, adopts a more cautious and conditional stance, noting that negative electoral consequences of illegal or semi‐legal practices have been inconsistent among countries with significant levels of corruption. Develops a series of analytical distinctions and empirical generalizations focusing on the concepts of party government and patronage, which starts by noting that the most basic linkages between governments and their supporting parties involve policies and appointments, and that traditional parliamentary theory neglects patronage as one important aspect of these linkages. In order to speculate about the origins of cross‐national differences in the extent of patronage, Blondel develops a classification scheme based upon two dimensions: the first is derived from the various types of party–government relationships—adversarial, consensual, and conciliatory; the second involves the extent of parliamentary support for the government; in addition to these dimensions, a distinction is made between those parliamentary settings in which parties are, in general terms, dependent upon the government, those in which parties predominate over the government, and those in which the government and its supporting party/ies are linked in a situation of mutual interdependence. These typologies show that patronage is extensive and widely distributed in ‘partitocratic’ countries, is less common in Westminster‐type majoritarian polities, is greatly reduced in ‘conciliatory’ systems, and has grown notably since the 1980s, but only in the first two of these categories; suggests that this increase is because favours, bribes, and corruption are utilized as a partial substitute for the unfulfilment of over‐ambitious government programme commitments; argues that an assessment of the effects of patronage also requires a differentiation among types of party government.

Chapter 2 studies the devotional aspect of the canon and suggests a cult of the canon took form in history and greatly shaped Chinese Buddhism. The author argues that the cult of the canon is an extension from the cult of the book and constitutes an important aspect of religious life in Chinese Buddhism.

Religious belief and practice are central to the understanding of any, or at least almost any, culture. As far as the gentry is concerned religious sensibility and religious observance immediately raise issues around internal and external worlds and around the possibility of a fundamental dichotomy between private and public spheres. However unwittingly, the historian cannot help but have one eye on the Reformation and the debates it engenders. This chapter approaches the religion of the gentry in its formative period, initially though the uniquely revealing phenomenon of the private chapel. It examines belief and worship in their most intimate setting: in the curia itself. It focuses on a particularly significant development that would govern the role of the gentry within the church for many centuries — the shift in patronage and support from the religious orders to the parish church.