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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.

The Hawaiian Kingdom was ruled by a paramount lineage through appointment of Hawaiians and Europeans to offices of state. Acceptance of laws, literacy and religion, on Hawaiian terms, maintained the primacy of the royal executive over its nobles, its ministers, and its system of island government. Foreign settlers were integrated within a Polynesian hierarchy as ‘service gentry’. Recognition by foreign powers allowed the ruling lineage to manage a Pacific state by securing a loyal civil service and control of political representation and the judiciary until the 1880s. Thereafter, royal patronage was challenged through the Legislature by a minority of lawyers, businessmen and republicans. By 1891, royal prerogatives were under threat and foreign relations depended on American good will. A militant faction overturned the monarchy in 1893, preparing the way for Congressional approval of an illegal settler government, annexation and Territorial status. But patronage politics continued into the 1930s under the influence of business corporations and Republican Executives.

This chapter argues that niches are built by “clustering distinctiveness”—drawing together particular types of people who are otherwise rare in the larger environment. First, this requires filtering out the influence of patronage politics, reducing the importance of networks on hiring decisions that leave employees more beholden to their patron than to their position. Second, it requires active selection. Selection entails finding, attracting, and recruiting a rare human resource: people who have motivations, inclinations, practices, and skill sets that provide a foundation for building a rational, impersonal administration oriented towards achieving the organization's goals. In the face of environmental challenges, the chapter highlights the intensive recruitment process of employees across the Ghanaian niches, including selection strategies, probationary periods, and recruiting from already professionalized environments. Those intensive and highly interpersonal recruitment processes create a sense within recruits that they are special and have been chosen—specifically, chosen for particular characteristics like incorruptibility and hard work, which others in the niche also share. Clustering a critical mass of those scarce resources with a shared sense of commonality enables new organizational possibilities, fostering in-group identification, dedication, and enhanced effort, culminating in a subculture of the bureaucratic ethos.

Chapter 5 deals with populists in office and exposes what the author terms the “populist blueprint.” Once again based on comparative empirical analysis, it explains how populist parties consolidate in power by means of grabbing the top state administration and depriving key liberal institutions of autonomy, especially the judiciary, state-independent authorities, and the media. Another common characteristic of all populist parties in office is their systematization of patronage politics under the logic of excluding the opposition from state-related benefits and other resources. Finally, the pieces of the illiberal and populist project are put together in an effort to think about it all in a systematic and rationalizing way.

This chapter explores the small number of pioneer Black firefighters that entered the FDNY from 1898 to 1930, as well as how these men survived with dignity despite encountering heinous acts of barbarity and racism in the FDNY.

Chapter 2 zooms in on the province of Formosa, in the north of Argentina, to reconstruct the history of peasant organizations (particularly the Peasant Leagues), the local impacts of neoliberalization, and the pervasiveness of patronage politics. Drawing from the life histories of two peasant women, the chapter reviews the economy and politics of the province as seen from the points of view of peasants and their organizations, introducing the rural communities analysed in the ensuing chapters. While chapters 3, 4, and 5 delve into events of contentious mobilization and processes of demobilization throughout a decade (2003–2013), this chapter serves as a broader historical canvas to situate that decade within a longer history of peasant struggles and cotton production in northern Argentina, covering the period between the 1970s (including the military government) and the 2000s.

In 1999 activists warned that politics was a sewer and that any who entered into it would be tainted. In 2012, many argued that those predictions were all too prescient. The VCK was widely spoken of as the katta panchayat party (though little evidence was ever produced to support this) and were said to be involved in compromising on cases and in cases of corruption. This chapter details these accounts and places them within a wider analysis of political brokerage and deal-making in Tamil Nadu. It demonstrates how Tamil politics works through informal connections, networks and deals and offers an analysis of such everyday corruption.

This chapter introduces the broad questions tackled by the book: What challenges do subordinate groups face when seeking to address environmental problems threatening their health and livelihoods? How do subordinate groups resist, but also negotiate and accommodate environmental threats and economic marginalization? The first section situates GM crops in the global context, focusing the expansion of agribusiness and the neoliberal globalization of the 1990s. The second section presents concepts of space and scale to discuss the global reach and localized manifestations of GM crops and their socioenvironmental impacts. The third section discusses the literature on social movements, processes of demobilization, and patronage politics. The fourth section explains why a global ethnography approach is best suited to analyze the social processes addressed by the book and complement the insights of the literature on food regimes.

This chapter introduces an analytic framework for the exploration of collective action in the contemporary Middle East. It proposes in particular a typology of modes of coordination of collective action that differentiates between organizational, coalitional, communitarian, and social movement modes based on different social network patterns. It suggests the Middle East sees a predominance of communitarian or organizational modes rather than pure “social movement” patterns. The reasons for this may be found in three elements at the core of the political process approach to social movements: the salience of multiple cleavages, the levels of repression, and the role of local elites. These basic properties of collective action seem to characterize both the long authoritarian phase that preceded 2011 and the most recent developments.