Clientelism, Interests, and Democratic Representation: The European Experience in Historical and Comparative Perspective

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.