Neopatrimonialism in Africa and Beyond

Abstract

Neopatrimonialism has become a catch-all explanation for state dysfunction and failed development in Africa. While serving this role, the concept has become “stretched,” to use Giovanni Satrori's term from his essay on comparative methodology in The American Political Science Review some 45 years ago. This has resulted in a concept that is mostly confined to Africa but that within Africa is applied to a very broad range of phenomena. The concept's limited geographical scope and weak intension hinder its usefulness and further development. Neopatrimonialism in Africa and Beyond attempts to rectify these problems by collecting essays that return to Max Weber to analyze the concept of neopatrimonialism, reexamine its applications in Africa, and apply it to political life outside Africa. Although the book replicates some of the conceptual confusion in the field as a whole, it also provides a useful starting point for authors who want either to make more-informed use of neopatrimonialism in their work on Africa or to apply neopatrimonialism to new contexts.Section one begins with an examination of the history and nuances of patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism. Here, Daniel Bach makes the important point that as the concept of neopatrimonialism spread through African studies, it became increasingly associated with anti-developmental outcomes. He points out that in the instances where patrimonialism or neopatrimonialism were used in other regions, such as Latin America or East Asia, it referred to aspects of personal or informal rule that were potentially compatible with a developmental state. Neopatrimonialism requires an entanglement of public and private interests, but this does not mean that the state is captured, hollowed out, or failing. This is a central theme of the book and comes up again in the conclusion. Diana Cammack and Tim Kelsall recently made a similar point in their article “Neo-patrimonialism, Institutions and Economic Growth: The Case of Malawi, 1964–2009,” IDS Bulletin, Vol. 42, No. 2 (2011), pp. 88–96, but this related work is unfortunately ignored in the Bach and Gazibo volume. The remaining conceptual chapters usefully analyze how Weber understood the concept of patrimonialism and the value of the prefix “neo-.” After the conceptual introduction, section two focuses on applying neopatrimonialism to new aspects of African cases, and section three examines cases outside Africa.Although section one includes the book's first case study (a revised version of Jean-François Médard's 1987 chapter on Charles Njonjo), it is the second section that focuses squarely on African cases. This section contains new work on democratization, conflict, “godfatherism” in Nigeria, and the customs bureaucracy in Niger. All of these chapters have new empirical details and generally smaller but interesting conceptual innovations, and in the interest of brevity I will note only a few. In the chapter on neopatrimonialism and democratization, Nicolas van de Walle makes a distinction between elite and mass forms of clientelism and argues that African states have traditionally relied on elite clientelism. If Africa experiences a sustained rise in participatory and competitive democratic politics, he expects to see elite clientelism decline and mass clientelism rise. The chapter on “godfatherism” in Nigeria shows how the mixture of public and private interests that is the hallmark of neopatrimonialism can exist at the margins of the official state as well as within it. At their best, these cases demonstrate novel applications of neopatrimonialism and show how the concept can still illuminate new aspects of African politics.The final section applies neopatrimonialism to cases outside Africa and includes chapters on the Philippines, Brazil, Uzbekistan, Italy, and French-African international relations. In many ways, these chapters are the most novel, and it is unfortunate that this section and the chapters within were not given more space. The third section provides strong evidence for the usefulness of the concept of neopatrimonialism outside Africa, helping to show that neopatrimonialism can exist in a wide variety of circumstances, from the Philippines to post-Soviet Uzbekistan, and can be coupled with diverse political and economic outcomes.The largest failing of the book is a failure that it shares with much of the field; namely, a disconnect between careful conceptual work (section 1) and empirical research (sections 2 and 3). After a long discussion about the theoretical differences between patrimonialism and neopatrimonialism, for example, some of the case studies then alternate between the two terms unselfconsciously. Although some of this may be expected from edited books, the disconnect is jarring. The book's greatest success is that it provides Africanists with both a deeper and wider view of one of their central concepts. The flaws of the book in no way outweigh its usefulness, and if anything they should propel more cross-regional work on neopatrimonialism.