The decline of patron-client relations in developed societies

Abstract

An enormous amount of scholarly attention has been devoted to the phenomenon of patron-client relations both in the form of conceptual elaboration and to the application of the patronage model to a wide variety of empirical situations. However despite the prodigious amount written on the relationship its analytical status remains equivocal: no one, for example, has been able to say with any degree of precision what patron-clientage is, and especially where patron-clientage ends and the reciprocity which pervades all social relations begins. But a certain lack of clarity has not deterred social scientists from resorting to the patron-client model and few studies of social and political change in the Third World manage to get by entirely without it.