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Public funds spent on jets and horses. Shoeboxes stuffed with embezzled cash. Ghost payrolls and incarcerated ex-governors. Illinois' culture of "Where's mine?" and the public apathy it engenders has made our state and local politics a disgrace.
 
In Corrupt Illinois, veteran political observers Thomas J. Gradel and Dick Simpson take aim at business-as-usual. Naming names, the authors lead readers through a gallery of rogues and rotten apples to illustrate how generations of chicanery have undermined faith in, and hope for, honest government. From there, they lay out how to implement institutional reforms that provide accountability and eradicate the favoritism, sweetheart deals, and conflicts of interest corroding our civic life.
 
Corrupt Illinois lays out a blueprint to transform our politics from a pay-to-play–driven marketplace into what it should be: an instrument of public good.

In the wake of the Mexican Revolution, citizens in many parts of Mexico experienced turbulent and uncertain times. This book tells the story of how the people of the Sierra Norte de Puebla emerged from those traumatic years and came to terms with the many challenges facing them in the decade that followed. It also examines the phenomenon of caciquismo in the postrevolutionary period as seen in the career of one powerful individual.

Gabriel Barrios Cabrera, leader of the Brigada Serrana, rose from rural obscurity in the tiny village of Cuacuila to a position of unprecedented military strength during the Revolution, and throughout the 1920s he and his brother Demetrio came to enjoy the confidence of the nation's presidents. This work provides an in-depth look at how a local political boss held on to power. Keith Brewster reveals how the story of the Sierra is inextricably linked to that of the Barrios Cabrera family, and he investigates the ways in which this interconnection developed.

Brewster argues that Barrios owed his long prominence to his sensitivity to the region's culture, but also shows that the extent of his power was exaggerated by both contemporaries and historians. Barrios was able to develop a working relationship with the federal government by endorsing its objectives and convincing them of his own indispensability, but his authority depended on the weakness of the federal government and on infighting within the Puebla state government; once both governments stabilized, Barrios quickly lost his grip on power.

Masterfully blending archival sources and oral history, Brewster captures life in the Sierra during the 1920s and examines the decision-making processes that determined how communities responded to new pressures, such as requests for soldiers or support for development projects. He shows that subaltern groups were able to shape and even resist state reforms, mustering evidence that the Sierra's indigenous communities drove hard bargains over issues affecting their everyday lives. Although many communities used Barrios as an intermediary, Brewster reveals that they did not universally accept his legitimacy but simply used his connections to pursue their own local agendas.

Brewster depicts the Sierra de Puebla of the 1920s as a scene of shifting balances of power where political, economic, social, and ethnic factors combined to produce the temporary ascendancy of different interest groups beyond and within the region. His study forces us to question assumptions about how power was exercised at the local and regional levels in postrevolutionary Mexico and will be of lasting interest to all concerned with the dynamics of caciquismo and the evolution of the Mexican political system.

“Political clientelism” is a term used to characterize the contemporary relationships between political elites and the poor in Latin America in which goods and services are traded for political favors. Javier Auyero critically deploys the notion in Poor People’s Politics to analyze the political practices of the Peronist Party among shantytown dwellers in contemporary Argentina.
Looking closely at the slum-dwellers’ informal problem-solving networks, which are necessary for material survival, and the different meanings of Peronism within these networks, Auyero presents the first ethnography of urban clientelism ever carried out in Argentina. Revealing a deep familiarity with the lives of the urban poor in Villa Paraíso, a stigmatized and destitute shantytown of Buenos Aires, Auyero demonstrates the ways in which local politicians present their vital favors to the poor and how the poor perceive and evaluate these favors. Having penetrated the networks, he describes how they are structured, what is traded, and the particular way in which women facilitate these transactions. Moreover, Auyero proposes that the act of granting favors or giving food in return for votes gives the politicians’ acts a performative and symbolic meaning that flavors the relation between problem-solver and problem-holder, while also creating quite different versions of contemporary Peronism. Along the way, Auyero is careful to situate the emergence and consolidation of clientelism in historic, cultural, and economic contexts.
Poor People’s Politics reexamines the relationship between politics and the destitute in Latin America, showing how deeply embedded politics are in the lives of those who do not mobilize in the usual sense of the word but who are far from passive. It will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars of Latin American studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, history, and cultural studies.

How have the waves of democracy and decentralization that swept the developing world in recent decades affected states—among the most important drivers of poverty and prosperity—at national and local levels in Ghana and beyond? State actors beneath the national level—what Barry Driscoll calls the local state—have considerable responsibility for carrying out state functions, but they are also forced to compete for these local state offices. How does a local state actually work in poor twentieth-century countries? This book offers a descriptive account, as well as a causal explanation, of how political competition affects the local state in Ghana. Driscoll shows how closely fought elections drive local state institutions to provide patronage. The source of these demands for patronage comes not from rent-seeking bureaucrats or landed elites but from the government’s own party volunteers. Driscoll explains how electoral competition affects how local state actors are insulated from such patronage demands. Moreover, these highly competitive, patronage-providing local governments actually have relatively better-qualified senior civil servants at their disposal. Driscoll makes sense of this paradox by introducing the logic of building administrative capacity in order to provide patronage. He then abstracts from the case of Ghana to generalize about how the effect of political competition is shaped by the locally salient variety of clientelism, which in turn is conditioned by the strength of the party system. The book draws on fourteen months of fieldwork in six of Ghana’s districts, far from the nation’s capital city. Ethnographic and interview data come from time spent with market traders, tax collectors, politicians, and other figures in local state offices. Quantitative data come from a survey covering almost all local governments. The result is a detailed account of Ghana’s local state power dynamics that has relevant implications for states across the developing world.

Writing letters to powerful people to win their favor and garner rewards such as political office, tax relief, and recommendations was an institution in Renaissance Florence; the practice was an important tool for those seeking social mobility, security, and recognition by others. In this detailed study of political and social patronage in fifteenth-century Florence, Paul D. McLean shows that patronage was much more than a pursuit of specific rewards. It was also a pursuit of relationships and of a self defined in relation to others. To become independent in Renaissance Florence, one first had to become connected. With The Art of the Network, McLean fills a gap in sociological scholarship by tracing the historical antecedents of networking and examining the concept of self that accompanies it. His analysis of patronage opens into a critique of contemporary theories about social networks and social capital, and an exploration of the sociological meaning of “culture.”

McLean scrutinized thousands of letters to and from Renaissance Florentines. He describes the social protocols the letters reveal, paying particular attention to the means by which Florentines crafted credible presentations of themselves. The letters, McLean contends, testify to the development not only of new forms of self-presentation but also of a new kind of self to be presented: an emergent, “modern” conception of self as an autonomous agent. They also bring to the fore the importance that their writers attached to concepts of honor, and the ways that they perceived themselves in relation to the Florentine state.