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But what is clientelism? In Roman law, clients were liberated slaves or immigrants who sought the protection of a patrician paterfamilias. They were dependent on the head of the family, as were all the other members of the household and, in exchange for protection, they were expected to render services. In contemporary political science, clientelism has assumed a generalized meaning. It is now seen as a network of social relations where personal loyalty to the patron prevails against the modern alternatives of market relations, democratic decision making, and professionalism in public bureaucracies. Client-patron relations are frequently invoked in explaining social relations in Latin America. And the concept is increasingly used to explain developments in other societies experiencing distorted processes of modernization.

Clientelism and corruption are different notions. Clientelism is a form of social organization, while corruption is an individual social behavior (where you are your own client, trying to play patron to yourself) that may or may not grow into a mass phenomenon. One can imagine clientelism without corruption, although the two often go hand in hand. In the postcommunist context, the two phenomena seem fused at the hip. To say that postcommunist clientelism presupposes or generates corruption is to imply that corruption has become a foundation stone of the region’s emerging clientelist social structure. I will call this phenomenon “clientelist corruption.” Clientelist corruption is a form of structural corruption, which should be distinguished from discrete individual acts of corruption.

In Eastern Europe, clientelism—in interaction with various forms and levels of corruption—is becoming a stable form of social organization. Clientelistic corruption pervades all areas of public life, although favoritism might be more important in public life than pure corruption. The feeling that governments are sleazy is inevitable. The omnipresence of governmental sleaze reinforces the impression that both public and private action (like favoring the admission of certain students over others at a school) will be reasonably understandable only within a clientelist setting.

Under postcommunist conditions, corruption, and other services rendered within the patronage system, become social actions in the Weberian sense. In the eyes of observant citizens, a public action will always fit into a clientelistic scheme; this is the context that gives social meaning to otherwise haphazard events (like the outcome of a public tender or a government position paper advocating exclusive executive responsibility for privatization). Attributing meaning to an action by defining it as clientelist corruption is rational, all the more so since the outcome of the social action cannot be explained in terms of market rationality or bureaucratic professionalism.

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