Didi Kuo seeks to explain how and why transitions from clientelism to national programmatic politics took place in the United States and United Kingdom in the latter part of the nineteenth century, and the role of organized business in that process. Her book comprises a theoretical chapter and four case studies, two on the United States and two on the UK.
For each country, the first case study examines the nineteenth-century growth and development of clientelism as a system of governance. Here, Kuo focuses on three arenas in which clientelistic practices combined to form an overarching strategy of governing: the electoral arena (through vote buying), the legislative arena (through pork barrel/distributive politics), and the bureaucratic arena (through patronage). Critical to her story is that the nineteenth-century growth in clientelism was facilitated by the wealth created by industrialization. Yet, from the perspective of further economic growth and development, the expansion of clientelism proved increasingly inefficient and problematic. As such, clientelism also provided an impetus for business interests both to organize nationally and to pressure for reform of state institutions and public policy.
The second case study for each country examines both the development of business organization and the subsequent pressure for political reform. By tracing out the linkages that existed between business and political parties before and during the growth of clientelism, Kuo is able to effectively highlight the novel nature of the new forms of business organization, the new demands emerging from those organizations, and, consequently, the changing nature of the linkages between business and political parties. Most importantly, however, the second case studies focus on the ways in which the demands of organized business served to counter the unpredictability and inefficiency of clientelistic governance. Pressure from business contributed to two parallel processes. The first entailed more efficient national-level governance through, for example, meritocratic appointments within the bureaucracy, and the development of greater regulatory capacity, as well as greater uniformity and predictability in state behavior. The second process concerned the growth of national-level party organizations increasingly competing with one another on the basis of national-level programmatic policies. Both processes served to marginalize and dramatically reduce the extent of clientelism. By the early twentieth century, both the apparatus and functioning of the state, and the nature of political party competition, had been transformed in both countries.
The variation between the United States and UK in the transition from clientelism to programmatic politics was, according to Kuo, a product of differential timing in business organization, party organization, and the transformation of the state. In the U.S. case, having organized early, business was recruited to help facilitate the transformation of the state and build new parties, thereafter enjoying a privileged position in relation to both. In the British case, because Conservative and Liberal Party organizations had both emerged and driven the transformation of the state before business had effectively organized at the national level, the latter enjoyed less of a privileged position relative to other societal interests (e.g., labor).
Theoretically, Kuo’s book makes a clear contribution to the body of work exploring the role of capitalist/business interests in the development of state capacity and public policy (e.g., Isabela Mares, The Politics of Social Risk: Business and Welfare State Development, 2003; Peter A. Swenson, Capitalists against Markets: The Making of Labor Markets and Welfare States in the United States and Sweden, 2002). One of the most persuasive aspects of Kuo’s argument for the centrality of business lies with the connection between the development of managerial capitalism, with its emphasis on meritocratic advancement and efficiency, and the subsequent transformation of the state along similar lines. The empirical chapters, and particularly her novel measures of clientelism, are the product of six months spent in the Center for Legislative Archives in Washington, DC, and six months in Britain’s Parliamentary Archives and British Library. The book is not only well executed but, given its ambition and scope, is also highly efficient at only 140 pages, including introduction and conclusion. Kuo does not do fluff!
Enjoyable and rewarding as the work is, and also possibly a very product of this, a number of questions remain that are pertinent to the central thesis and its capacity to travel. Moreover, these questions might have been broached in a preliminary manner without any significant loss of efficiency through a more developed and reflective final chapter (the conclusion is but seven pages).
First is the role of organized labor, which does receive an occasional brief mention but is relegated to that of another societal interest alongside the likes of agriculture and religious groups. It is not simply that in the literature on the development of democracy and social policy, labor is typically viewed as a critical actor. Rather, it is that organized labor can be expected to exert similar and complementary pressures for programmatic politics and to more easily coalesce around a common set of national programmatic demands than organized business can. Business organizations may be able to more easily overcome collective-action problems, but the state of competition between different businesses and different business organizations should make for a more heterogenous set of demands than we might expect from labor. Critically, though, to demonstrate the centrality of organized business, we could do with a more robust demonstration that organized labor either was of secondary importance or became relevant only after pressure from business had effected real change.
A second and related issue is the extent to which the explanation of the transition might travel beyond the U.S. and UK cases. Would a similar narrative emphasizing the centrality of pressure from organized business emerge from an examination of the Swedish and German cases, or another continental European pairing? We can expect differing cross-national configurations in the timing of national-level business (and labor) organization, of political party organization, of industrialization, and of the expansion of the state. It is not too difficult to imagine organized business lacking the significance or centrality accorded to it here were different countries studied. Indeed, a case might be made that this is really a story of the U.S. transition from clientelism to programmatic politics. It is not simply that the book’s coverage of the British case is less substantial than that of the United States, but it is also far less theoretically central to the core argument. The linkage between the emergence of managerial capitalism and the transformation of the state is an argument about U.S. development. In the British case, that the organization of business appears to postdate the expansion of both the state and political party organization poses a problem for the notion that business pressure was really foundational in the transition to programmatic politics in Britain.
These quibbles aside, Clientelism, Capitalism, and Democracy is well worth reading, has far more nuance and depth than this brief review has come close to conveying, and makes an important theoretical contribution to the study of clientelism. As an exercise in comparative historical analysis, it is both innovative in its construction of intertemporal measures of clientelism in the United States and UK and very well executed. Indeed, it is a testament to the quality of Kuo’s work that its brevity, and the decidedly brief conclusion in particular, is probably the book’s most serious limitation.
