Social Theory and the Sociology of Clientelism: Groundwork for a Gramscian Alternative
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The category “clientelism” captures a very wide variety of political phenomena, wider perhaps than other peer concepts. It also harbors the potential to serve as an alternative to both liberal institutionalism and power elite theory. But recent trends in the literature have not realized the category’s potential. The key problem with the literature is that it is on shaky conceptual ground. Toward a revamped sociology of clientelism, this essay attends to associated theoretical problems and potential payoffs. It surveys definitions and probes normative issues at the heart of clientelism. It identifies the accomplishments and limitations of the leading theoretical traditions, offshoots of neo-Durkheimian gift theory and neo-Weberian principal-agent theory. Drawing instead from Gramscian theory, it proposes that we view soliciting subordination as the central feature of clientelism. This approach offers both a lens for unifying phenomena hitherto thought to be very different under a single conceptual scheme and a model for explaining political development. This helps enable the category to serve in a quite general theory which could ultimately provide an alternative to liberal-institutional and elite-pact brands of political sociology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.061 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".