The Origins of Patronage Politics: State Building, Centrifugalism, and Decolonization

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Patronage in the state sector is a major drag on the quality of government. As with corruption more generally, it is associated with a host of negative developmental outcomes.¹The key feature of patronage states is that personnel practices in the public sector are governed by particularistic rather than meritocratic criteria.²As Kanchan Chandra points out, the use of nonmeritocratic criteria in determining personnel decisions within the state sector is especially important in circumstances where the state is a significant employer.³However, patronage in the state sector is important for another reason. Even when the state is not the predominant employer, because state employees depend on their political patrons for their livelihoods, they are susceptible to political interference.⁴As a result, state programs, from pensions to mining permits, can be controlled by political brokers for their own ends. Patronage in the public sector is not a necessary cause of poor quality government, but all the evidence points to its sufficiency. Yet if patronage is so damaging to long-term socioeconomic and political outcomes, how does it become institutionalized in the first place? Just as importantly, why does patronage politics persist in some cases but undergo reform in others?

According to the influential theory of Martin Shefter, patronage politics results from the capture of the state for the purposes of party building by political intermediaries.⁵This will occur where democratization precedes professionalization of the bureaucracy and mass mobilization by political parties. By design, this theory only addresses the issue of patronage in democratic states. In this article, I argue that theorists have thus far neglected the broader state-building context in which patronage is institutionalized and maintained. Drawing on the state-building process in the colonies of the British Empire, in particular India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka),⁶I put forward an alternative model of the origins of patronage politics. First, the colonial cases examined here reveal that where there were strong centrifugal and disintegrative pressures at the time when the new nation states were formed, local (or subnational) control over the distribution of patronage was institutionalized. When the tensions surrounding decolonization posed a threat to the integrity of the state, nation builders responded with a combination...