Neopatrimonialism and Political Regimes
‘Neopatrimonialism’ refers to the coexistence and interaction of formal and informal institutions or a widespread informal behaviour within a formal polity such as a modern state. In other words, it is a concept that systematically includes both formal and informal institutions. Scholars often struggle with the interaction of the formal and informal dimension of governance, particularly outside the Western world. However, although the concept is often associated with African studies, from the beginning it was intended to be a universal model. In fact, it can be applied to understand politics in areas such as Southeast and Central Asia, the Middle East, and even Southeast and post-communist Europe; the phenomenon is not confined to these areas, nor does it reduce politics to ‘big man syndrome’.
In African studies, there has been a tendency for scholars to reject the idea that formal institutions, which were equated with the (formal) ‘Western’ modern state, are of any relevance at all. Many scholars perceived African politics to be dominated by informal institutions or at least by informal behaviour (Chabal and Daloz 1999; Hydén 2006: 98), despite the fact that in most African states formal institutions matter to some degree. However, recent research on African politics indicates that crucial formal institutions become increasingly institutionalized (Solt 2001; Posner and Young 2007; Lindberg 2006). Hence, the coexistence of formal institutions with informal institutions and informal behaviour is becoming an increasingly pertinent area of research (see Olivier de Sardan, this volume).
History
The origin of the concept of neopatrimonialism dates back to the developmental studies of the early 1970s when Eisenstadt (1973) is thought to have coined the term. During the 1970s it was part of the general debate about ‘modernization’. He challenged the dichotomous paradigm of modernization theory by arguing that there is not only a traditional society and modernity; rather, within the modern world there are also systems that do not comply to the ‘nation-state model’ and are best captured by terms such as ‘patrimonialism’ and ‘neopatrimonialism’. From the beginning, the concept had a universalistic claim applicable to developing countries in general (e.g. Theobald 1982; Roth 1987). On this basis, Médard (1982) and Clapham (1985) developed and applied the concept to Africa. Only Le Vine (1980) explicitly adapted neopatrimonialism to a particular African variant of patrimonialism. During the 1980s the concept suffered a decline in usage in developmental studies, but experienced a revival in African studies during the 1990s. Above all, it became a frequent explanation for failures in transition processes from authoritarian to democratic rule (Bratton and van de Walle 1997). Neopatrimonialism was also used to explain the continued economic crisis in Africa (Englebert 2000; van de Walle 2001).
It is important to note that all those scholars who discussed the formation of the concept linked it to Max Weber’s ideal types of domination that were themselves conceived as universal concepts. In this tradition, scholars conceptualized neopatrimonialism as a ‘mixed type’, comprising elements of patrimonial and legal-rational bureaucratic domination (see below). However, there were frequent complaints about conceptual shortcomings (Le Vine 1980: 663; Theobald 1982: 555; Clapham 1982: 32; Erdmann and Engel 2007: 97–104; de Grassi 2008; Pitcher et al. 2009), some of which will be reiterated here.
Against this background of a Weberian scholarship, it is evident that the concept is not linked to the ‘neo-liberal project’ of the 1990s as some authors claim (Olukoshi 1998: 14), nor should it be completely misrepresented as a ‘personalist approach’ that seeks to describe African behaviour as in effect ‘genetic’ and ‘preordained’ (Bauer and Taylor 2005: 9–10).
Definition
As indicated above, until the mid-1990s, the concept of neopatrimonialism was ill defined. Most often the distinction between patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism was blurred, the meaning of both conflated. Sometimes neopatrimonialism was just used as a synonym for personal rule, clientelism, and patronage. Others scholars provide a sort of ‘dense’ description of the phenomenon. Often the prefix ‘neo’ was used to describe a somehow modern or area-specific variant of patrimonialism without much specification (Erdmann and Engel 2007; Pitcher et al. 2009). The varied meanings and application of the concept have contributed to frequent claims that it has become a ‘catch-all concept’ with diminished analytical power (ibid.; de Grassi 2008).
Indeed a recent survey of how neopatrimonialism is used in African studies has identified four different applications, which can be interrelated. Scholars have depicted the concept as:
(Adapted from Pitcher et al. 2009: 131)
Scholars have only recently sought to be more specific in their use of the term. Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle (1997), in their seminal work Democratic Experiments in Africa, opened up the space for a more precise understanding of neopatrimonialism. They were the first to define neopatrimonialism as being clearly distinct from patrimonialism.
Max Weber distinguished ‘three pure types of legitimate domination’ (‘authority’ = Herrschaft):1 legal-rational bureaucratic domination, traditional domination, and charismatic domination. Patrimonialism is one type of traditional domination. Under traditional domination, ‘obedience is owed to the person … who occupies the traditionally sanctioned position of authority’, but not to the enacted rules: ‘Personal loyalty, not the official’s impersonal duty, determines the relations of the administrative staff to the master’ (Weber 1978: 227). By contrast, legal rational domination is based on obedience to the ‘legally established impersonal order’. The three most fundamental categories of rational legal authority are a ‘continuous rule-bound conduct of official business’, a ‘specific specified sphere of competence (jurisdiction)’, and the ‘organization of offices follows the principle of hierarchy’ (ibid.: 215–18). Its formal incarnation is the bureaucratic administration of the modern Western state.
According to Bratton and van de Walle (1997: 62), neopatrimonialism is characterized by customs and patterns of patrimonialism that coexist with, and suffuse, rational-legal institutions. Based on a critical discussion of their concept, the following definition was proposed:
Neopatrimonialism is a mixture of two types of domination: namely, patrimonial and legal-rational bureaucratic domination. Under patrimonialism, all power relations between ruler and ruled, political as well as administrative relations, are personal relations; there is no differentiation between the private and the public realm. However, under neopatrimonialism the distinction between the private and the public, at least formally, exists and is accepted … Neopatrimonial rule takes place within the framework of, and with the claim to, legal-rational bureaucracy or ‘modern’ stateness. Formal structures and rules do exist, although in practice the separation of the private and public sphere is not always observed. In other words, two role systems or logics exist next to each other, the patrimonial of the personal relations, and the legal-rational of the bureaucracy.
(Erdmann and Engel 2007: 105)
This means that the two spheres are not isolated from each other; the patrimonial penetrates the legal-rational system, twists its logic, functions, and output, but does not take exclusive control over the legal-rational logic. Formal and informal institutions and behaviour are intimately linked to each other in various ways and by varying degrees and this mixture becomes institutionalized. Within this system, people have a certain degree of choice as to which logic they want to employ to achieve their goals and best realize their interests. Thus, the crucial feature of neopatrimonialism is the insecurity about the role of state institutions and the behaviour of their agents. The systematic uncertainty about which rules or which relationship are best utilized in any particular situation in order to achieve a particular goal – either the legal-rational (formal) or the patrimonial (informal) – shapes the behaviour of individuals and organizations. All actors strive to overcome their insecurity, but they do so by employing different combinations of the two underlying logics that operate within neopatrimonial systems. Ultimately, this inherent insecurity is reproduced in a systematic way. One additional remark must be made. Within such a pattern of social and political relations, formal state institutions cannot fulfil their (supposed) universalistic purpose; but they might fulfil other purposes and perform other functions for a different ‘system’ in which particularistic interests determine politics and policies.
Conceptual Shortcomings
To begin, it is worth noting a general observation about the way in which the term neopatrimonialism is used, which illuminates a major problem with the concept. Neopatrimonialism is usually applied as an independent variable in research projects. This means the concept is taken as ‘given’ and used to explain something else – for example, an ill-functioning democracy, a poor policy outcome, or an economic crisis. I know of only one study that takes neopatrimonialism as a dependent variable or as something that needs to be explained. Moreover, I know of no study that investigates thoroughly whether a form of domination (regime or system) is actually neo-patrimonial or is better described another way. This observation indicates a number of conceptual problems that will be discussed below.
The Problem of Delineation
Regardless of how we make use of the concept, even using it as a meaningful independent variable, we must be able to answer the following questions: How can we recognize a neopatrimonial type of domination? How can we distinguish such a type from others? To answer these questions, we need to be able to identify clearly defined attributes or components (properties or indicators) that would allow us to determine the specific character of a given type of domination and to distinguish it from others. Unfortunately, such clear and explicit criteria are missing in all definitions and descriptions of the concept.
This unresolved issue reveals what I refer to as the ‘delineation’ or ‘benchmark’ problem of the concept. Without specifying such attributes it will be impossible to identify a neopatrimonial form of domination. For this purpose, we must be in a position to distinguish between a patrimonialism, neopatrimonialism, and legal-rational type of domination. Exactly where should we draw the borders?
At a first glance, neopatrimonialism is defined quite clearly as a mixture of two other types; hence, it is not patrimonial or legal-rational bureaucratic domination, but a fusion of the two. However, if we go a step further we then need to answer the question of how much of a system needs to be patrimonial or rational-legal for it to qualify as neopatrimonial? Is it about 50–50? Or is a minimum of 25 per cent on one side sufficient? We can also ask this question the other way round. In systems recognized as being legal-rational bureaucratic, there are usually informal elements or non-rule-bound behaviours and informal institutions, some of which are even required to make the formal institutions work. So how many ‘patrimonial defects’ in a legal-rational bureaucratic system are necessary for it to be called neopatrimonial? Or the other way round, how much legal-rational bureaucracy is required to turn a patrimonial regime into a neopatrimonial one?
It is surprising that there is no discussion about the delineation or threshold issue and how to solve this problem among scholars who use the concept. Instead, there is hardly any explication as to why a given system is termed ‘neopatrimonial’, apart from general references to non-formal politics, clientelism, and patronage. This leads directly to the next problem: how to apply the concept in empirical research.
The Problem of Operationalization
As implied above, only a few authors have explicitly addressed the challenge of operationalizing neopatrimonialism. Snyder (1992: 379) identified ‘an extensive network of personal patronage’, which determined the character of neopatrimonial regimes, and stated that the penetration of state institutions by these networks ‘tend[s] to be uneven’. However, he did not explain how we can establish the existence of an extensive network of personal relations and the degree of penetration into state institutions. Based on the assumption that there is a vital link between patrimonialism and broader socioeconomic factors, Theobald (1982: 559) related specific instances of patrimonialism to ‘these contextual variables’. However, he confined himself vaguely to ‘three sets of variables’ that, apart from casually naming some (the size and composition of gross domestic product (GDP) and the subsistence sector; the general nature of the relationship between the political executive and the administration), he did not elaborate further with regard to their relationship to each other. Possibly as a result of the very general nature of these variables (for example the rate of social mobilization), the literature on neopatrimonialism has made no systematic use of Theobald’s suggestion.
More recently, Bratton and van de Walle (1997) suggested another substantive approach to the problem. They identified three informal political institutions that are said to be typical of neopatrimonial regimes. First, ‘presidentialism’, which here means the ‘systematic concentration of political power in the hands of one individual, who resists delegating all but the most trivial decision-making tasks’ (ibid.: 63). Second, ‘systematic clientelism’, which implies that the president or ‘strongman’ relies on awarding of personal favours, for example the distribution of public-sector jobs and public resources through licenses, contracts, and projects (ibid.: 65–66). Third, the ‘use of state resources for political legitimation’, which is closely linked to clientelism (ibid.: 66–67). The first problem with this proposition is that the first variable is not indicative of neopatrimonialism, but of a kind of patrimonialism, for everything is left to the discretion of the unrestrained ruler. The crucial question of whether or not presidential powers are applied according to formal constitutional rules (if presidential powers were rule-based then this could be rule-bound behaviour) is not addressed. Another problem is that the second variable is underspecified –’use of state resources for political legitimation’ is not very precise. This phenomenon can be identified in all sorts of political regimes; even in the best of all democracies, politicians will try to find policies that use state resources in order to please the majority of the electorate in order to build support for the next elections. What Bratton and van de Walle probably meant was simply that political office is used for appropriating public wealth for private enrichment as well as selective patronage, but this would require a different phrasing of the indicator.
It is worth further exploring the possibility of employing patronage or clientelism as one indicator of neopatrimonialism because both turn up in most descriptions and definitions of the concept. The systematic analysis of the distribution of public resources, including development projects, to particular regions, districts, or ethnic (sub-)groups, along with the distribution of ministerial and other major political and administrative posts, might generate an indicative pattern of patronage or clientelistic politics. However, adopting this strategy simply swaps one conceptual problem for another; instead of neopatrimonialism, we would have to know how to operationalize patronage or clientelism.
As Landé (1983: 440) has observed, there are three problems related to comparative research on clientelism: conceptualization, observation, and explanation. Taking them in order: (1) there is no basic agreement as to what is to be included in the study of clientelism; (2) the ‘amorphousness’, the ‘latency’, and the ‘elusiveness’ of clientelism make measurement extremely difficult; and finally, (3) due to methodological questions we have failed to satisfactorily explain the existence of clientelism. Because confusion about terminology and methodology remain, and because we still lack clear criteria to distinguish ‘clients’ from ‘non-clients’, it is still very difficult to deal with ‘clientelism’ in empirical and comparative research. This lack of conceptual clarity applies to ‘patronage’ as well: indeed, patronage and clientelism are often conflated or not sufficiently distinguished (Erdmann and Engel 2007: 106–8).
Building on Bratton and van de Walle, Christian von Soest has further refined the concentration-of-power indicator by suggesting an ‘and-connection’ between the concentration of power in the hands of the president and a high turnover of five key cabinet members (von Soest 2009: 56). In addition, he operationalizes the clientelism indicator by looking at the ‘size and the composition of the ministerial cabinet’, and measures the third informal institution, the ‘misuse of state resources’, by using the corruption ratings of Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI) and the World Bank Governance Index in respect to ‘control of corruption’ (ibid.: 57–58).
All this is an improvement over Bratton and van de Walle’s original operationalization. However, it does not really solve the aforementioned because all of the new indicators are vague: they do not tell us the exact number of turnovers of key cabinet ministers, or which cabinet size, or which ranking in one of the corruption indexes, turns a legal-rational bureaucratic type of domination into a neopatrimonial one. Once again, the problem is that we lack clearly defined benchmarks.
Moreover, it is unclear whether these indicators really measure what they are supposed to. Beyond the claim that these indicators are highly correlated with neopatrimonialism, there is very little conceptual discussion about their usefulness, not to mention any test of their validity. The size of a cabinet could be dictated by various political reasons that might have nothing to do with neopatrimonial practices. For example, having a bigger cabinet might be an attempt to include as many different political groups as possible in order to keep peace, to unite all political forces behind one particular goal, or to integrate a heterogeneous polity – all of which may occur whether or not there is clientelist politics, the misuse of state resources for private gains, and a largely corrupt political system. These issues need to be thoroughly discussed before we can be sure of the suitability of the indicator. For example, there is a problem with using corruption indices to measure the misuse of state funds by the political elite in government because both of the indexes mentioned above appraise both grand and petty corruption; hence, they are ‘second-best indicators’ (ibid.: 58) when it comes to the specific purpose of indicating corruption among the political elite.
Finally, there are two other unresolved problems. One is that the indicators discussed in detail here are related to the political sphere, which is much less formally rule-based than the bureaucracy proper and so may underestimate the degree of rule following in a given country – a crucial issue which I shall discuss in the next sub-section. The other problem is related to what Bratton and van de Walle refer to as the informal institutions of neopatrimonialism. Scholars relying on an institutionalist approach often view behaviour that does not follow formal rules as being attributable to the presence of informal institutions. However, there is a general tendency in neopatrimonialist or patrimonialist studies to view informal or non-rule-bound behaviour not as an institution but as something ‘ingrained’ or culturally or traditionally embedded. Helmke and Levitzky (2006: 6–8) have emphasized the distinction between informal behaviour and informal institutions. In other words, not all non-rule-bound behaviour constitutes an informal institution. A formal rule might not be observed, but that does not mean that deviant behaviour is guided by a different institution or set of rules. Therefore, the challenge is to distinguish between non-rule-bound behaviour according to a formal institution and behaviour according to an informal institution. How to distinguish between informal behaviour and institutions, and the problems this raises for institutionalist approaches, has not been discussed at all.
It is therefore impossible to avoid the conclusion that neopatrimonialism remains poorly operationalized for empirical research. The indicators or properties that have been put forward for this purpose are very ‘soft’ and ill defined and it is therefore difficult to establish whether or not the concept is able to ‘catch’ the phenomenon it claims to describe.
The Significance of the Political and Administrative Sphere
The most recent operationalizations of neopatrimonialism focus on the political dimension of the concept, which means that they focus on only one dimension and tend to ignore the second: the administrative dimension. Claiming that a political system is neopatrimonial based on observing only its political side may be highly misleading. One has to take into account that there might be strong patrimonial behaviour in the political sphere, while the public administration operates largely according to legal-rational bureaucratic principles. Put another way, focusing only on political issues conflates the two dimensions of government and governance, which, at least for analytical purposes, should be kept separate. The reason that maintaining this distinction is valuable is that the political sphere of government (and governance) is much less regulated by formal rule than the administrative sphere. The government proper, which is the arena of politicians who might be elected, nominated, or self-nominated by force, is not entirely submitted to legal-rational bureaucratic rule, not even in a democracy. Most of the political decisions are at the discretion of the politicians, although they have to observe certain procedural rules and some basic values and norms that are embedded in the constitution. The sphere of the administration – the state bureaucracy and its administrative staff – is much more closely regulated by legal-rational bureaucratic rules.
This distinction between governmental spheres is perfectly at one with Weber’s concept of rational domination: ‘There are very important types of rational domination which, with respect to the [head of administrative staff], belong to other types … ; this is true of the hereditary charismatic type … and of a pure charismatic type of a president chosen by plebiscite’ (Weber 1978: 219, 222, own translation). The implication is: ‘at the top of a bureaucratic organisation, there is necessarily an element which is at least not purely bureaucratic’ (Weber 1980: 126, own translation). Presidents, prime ministers, and cabinet ministers are not proper ‘officials’ (Beamte) within the legal-rational bureaucracy, which requires staff to have technical qualifications. Membership in a ministerial cabinet requires ‘political’ qualifications only; the nomination of cabinet members is usually left to the discretion of the head of government, and the number of cabinet members is usually not regulated by the constitution (only the nomination procedure is prescribed). This means there is always a personal or patrimonial dimension in even the most advanced or pure type of legal-rational bureaucratic domination. There is, however, a difference between authoritarian and democratic regimes as regards to the scope of the personal or patrimonial sphere: a democratically elected leader or head of government is subjected to legal-rational rules himself (the rule of law) much more than an authoritarian ruler (for a discussion of these issues, see the next section).
We therefore need a separate analysis of each of the two dimensions of government: first, the conduct of political office and, second, the conduct of bureaucratic office. For the first, the well-known criteria that allow the distinction between authoritarian and democratic governance can be applied. For the second, one might use specific indicators that allow administrative behaviour to be assessed – for example, a list provided by Max Weber – although these are clearly not exhaustive. To do this an analysis of how the bureaucracy operates is required. Hence, we have to establish how far the stipulated rules are observed, how the officials concur with their formal obligations of the legal-rational roles, and to what extent and frequency they deviate from the conception of their role. This should provide an answer to the question of the degree to which formal bureaucratic behaviour is routinized vis-à-vis informal behaviour. Yet so far hardly any studies of neopatrimonialism have included an analysis of the functioning of the state administration proper, with the exception of von Soest (2009, 2007), who tried to assess the legal-rational and neopatrimonial behaviour of the tax administration in Zambia and Botswana.
The Problem of Subtypes
Since neopatrimonialism can have different empirical manifestations – closer to patrimonialism or closer to legal-rational domination – and these may have different effects, authors have suggested the formation of subtypes in order to increase the analytical power of the concept (Snyder and Mahoney 1999: 112, 118; Erdmann and Engel 2007: 114). Although no elaborated subtypes have been suggested or developed yet within African Studies, a number of scholars of Central Asian studies have made an attempt to differentiate the concept for classificatory purposes based on Bratton and van de Walle’s discussion, and have developed the following subtypes (Fisun 2003; Gawrich and Franke 2009):
(Adapted from Gawrich and Franke 2009: 5)
A major advantage of this typology is that it uses Weberian terminology, which fits with the conceptual roots of neopatrimonialism. However, the two major challenges for each typology – first, exclusiveness (are the types sufficiently distinctive or specific?), and second, exhaustiveness (are they sufficiently inclusive?) – are not so neatly addressed. The ‘exhaustiveness’ criterion is not such a problem in this case, as the four types cover a wide empirical range that spans from the first type, which is close to patrimonialism, to the fourth type, which is close to legal-rational bureaucratic rule (although the authors need to do more to explain exactly where the dividing lines between these categories lie in practice).
The ‘exclusiveness’ of the typology is more of a problem. The explication of the different types comes in the form of very short descriptions and the phrasing is not very precise (‘competition may be strong’). Another problem is that one particular subtype is defined through an economic behaviour: ‘rent-seeking’. Is this a behaviour that is relevant for neopatrimonialism only? Why is it a feature of only one subtype? More fundamentally, while ‘informality in the bureaucracy’ is a defining attribute of neopatrimonialism, how can this be used as a defining attribute of one subtype? There is no in-depth discussion of these issues. As a result, the subtypes proposed by Gawrich and Franke are not sufficiently specific in their definitions or consistent in the criteria they specify to be effectively applied to empirical research.
The most recent suggestion of ‘regulated and predatory forms of neopatrimonialism’ based on African cases (Bach 2011: 277–79; see also Bach 2012) is not very helpful either, as it suffers from all the same familiar problems mentioned above; in particular, it once again conflates patrimonialism with neopatrimonialism and remains vague about how to distinguish between these two ‘forms’.
Neopatrimonialism and Regime Types
Another contentious issue is the debate about how neopatrimonialism relates to the classical regime types. There are several questions related to the issue. First, is neopatrimonialism a regime type of its own? Second, how does neopatrimonialism relate to democratic and/or authoritarian regimes? Often the application of the concept suggests that neopatrimonialism is a type of its own, a hybrid type of regime somewhere between democracy and dictatorship. At the same time, there seems to be an agreement that neopatrimonial domination belongs to the realm of non-democratic regimes. However, only a few authors explicitly address this question. Critical discussions of the concept claim that it is not a regime type of its own (Erdmann and Engel 2007: 111; Pitcher et al. 2009: 126). However, this raises further contentious questions: Is it possible to have a neopatrimonial democracy? Would such a regime be a hybrid regime or a defective democracy? Is it possible to observe a non-neopatrimonial autocracy – or is this a contradiction in terms?
Democracy is closely linked to the rule of law and thus dependent on a functioning legal-rational bureaucracy and its rules (VonDoepp, this volume). Consequently, legal-rational domination finds its logical incarnation in a democratic framework. However, as mentioned above, even the purest type of legal-rational bureaucratic domination accommodates some patrimonial elements as well. Along with many other political scientists, I would argue that liberal democracy and neopatrimonialism are not compatible with each other – by definition they exclude each other – but that neopatrimonialism may be compatible with defective democracies (see van de Walle, this volume).
Ann Pitcher and her colleagues have challenged this view. They argue with the example of Botswana that liberal democracy and neopatrimonialism are compatible: the political regime is ‘neopatrimonial, yet democratic’ (Pitcher et al. 2009: 144). They acknowledge that elections are widely regarded as fair and substantially free of fraud, and although elections have not resulted in a handover of power to an opposition party, the latter were able to secure lower-level election victories. Quoting the Botswana expert Kenneth Good (1992), they describe the regime as an ‘open elite democracy’ in which patrimonialism has not been abandoned by the elite. The elite has built a ‘democratic state on the foundation of traditional and highly personalised reciprocities and loyalties’ (Pitcher et al. 2009: 145).
The point of disagreement here is foremost not an empirical but rather a conceptual one (from which empirical problems arise). The conceptual problem is twofold. Like many others, Pitcher and her colleagues do not clearly explicate how they distinguish between a neopatrimonial and a legal-rational bureaucratic form of domination or define the concept of liberal democracy. In other words, the real question is whether or not Botswana should be called a ‘democracy’. Without going into details, one way out of this disagreement would be to agree that if an increasing ‘share’ of patrimonialism impacts, for example, the practice of the rule of law, even if the electoral regime as the core regime of a democracy is unaffected, one would want to call the country in question not a liberal democracy but a defective or more precisely an ‘illiberal’, ‘delegative’, or ‘electoral’ democracy (Merkel 2004; O’Donnell 1994; Freedom House 2011). If we follow this line of reasoning, a defective democracy might be compatible with a weak (‘low-intensity’) kind of neopatrimonialism, but this would not be true of liberal democracies. Of course, here again the crucial question is how most accurately to distinguish between a liberal and an illiberal democracy.
Although neopatrimonialism may not be compatible with liberal democracy, authoritarian rule should not be equated with neopatrimonialism. There is considerable evidence that a legal-rational bureaucracy can exist within an authoritarian regime, which, for example, might have a corporatist character, as in many cases in Latin America. Another classic example of nonneopatrimonial authoritarianism is Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century, during which the country was largely governed by a legal-rational bureaucracy and the rule of law, although this version of the rule of law was not based on basic political or human rights. Hence, various possible combinations of the type of regime and the type of bureaucracy are possible, which demonstrates how important it is to differentiate and devote attention to the two spheres of government: the political and the bureaucratic.
Significantly, clarifying how different authoritarian regimes function is crucial if we are accurately to assess their chances of successfully democratizing. Bratton and van de Walle (1994) make this point well with regards to the different outcomes of transitions in Africa. They argue that transitions in Latin America and in Southern and Eastern Europe took place in authoritarian regimes that were corporatist in nature, while authoritarian regimes in Africa were distinctly neopatrimonial, which provided a major institutional impediment to democratic consolidation. In fact, while the majority of Latin American countries succeeded in establishing at least defective democracies, in Africa democratic transitions were much less successful. Based on a few cases in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Snyder (1992; see also Brownlee 2002) made a similar argument when he observed that transitions from neopatrimonial authoritarian regimes tend to result in non-democratic rule.
Conclusion
Neopatrimonialism is still characterized by several conceptual weaknesses: it lacks a clear and useful definition; there is no delineation to other related concepts; and it is poorly operationalized. Discussions of the concept are often one-sided and unbalanced, and no convincing subtypes have yet been developed. One consequence of these flaws is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to identify and clearly explain why or why not a regime should be described as neopatrimonial. All this makes it problematic to use the concept in empirical research. However, the term maintains its heuristic value by directing our attention to the unresolved problem of how to investigate the widespread phenomenon of the interaction between formal institutions and informal behaviour and/or institutions in politics. To overcome these limitations, further conceptual elaboration is required.
Note
1For the translation of the German Herrschaft, both ‘domination’ and ‘authority’ are used alternatively by Weber’s translators and editors.
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