UCLA

This research investigate the geographical logic of political clientelism. It show how political clientelism works in a macro-comparative perspective using the contrasting cases of Southern Italy and California as examples of two ideal-types in which clientelistic politics operates. The main finding is that the allocation and flow of financial funds related to public and infrastructural spending is influenced by clientelistic political strategies. This means that variations in the territorial distribution of public and infrastructural spending structure and govern electoral outcomes - e.g. exchange of votes in return for allocation of resources (favors). Decreasing expenditures in Southern Italy lead to increase in preference voting, whereas increasing availability of state and federal resources increase incumbent advantage and push for increasing role of lobbying and special-interests politics in the state of California. This contrasting patterns demonstrate how the different forms in which territorial politics is being constructed plays out in in two macro-regions in a global world dominated by incipient processes of decentralization and state restructuring.