Description: This volume seeks to contribute to this new line of research and develops a theoretical framework to study the consequences of clientelism for democratic representation.
Brief description: Maria Spirova is senior lecturer of Comparative Politics and International Relations, University of Leiden. She holds a PhD in political science from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee and has previously studied political science at the Central European University and the American University in Bulgaria. She works in the area of comparative politics and her research interests include political parties, party patronage and corruption and the democratic representation of ethnic minorities.
Review Quotes: A timely and insightful contribution to the ongoing debate on the drivers of clientelism and its consequences for democratic representation. This collection of essays, spanning many regions of the world - from Latin America to India, from Europe to Asia - investigates both sides of democratic representation - delegation and accountability - analyzing clitetelism in both roles as dependent and independent variable. Building on a consolidated literature, the editors, Saskia Ruth-Lovell and Maria Spirova, and the other contributors to this volume arrive at some important conclusions - for example, that ethnic or other types of segmental politics are fully compatible with the adoption of clientelistic exchanges or that clientelism indeed tends to undermine its own financial sustainability and lead to suboptimal allocation of resources - by means of often innovative quantitative and qualitative analyses that push the frontier of research on clientelism forward.--Simona Piattoni, Professor of Political Science, University of Trento