Beyond Clientelism

In choosing strategies of state capture (the extraction of private benefits by incumbent officeholders from the state), rulers choose whether to share rents with popular constituencies and whether to tolerate competition. These choices are conditioned by existing organizational endowments, the costs of buying support, and the trade-off between the cost and probability of exit from office. In turn, both rent distribution and competition result in distinct configurations of state capture: clientelism, predation, fusion, exploitation, and the formation of specific state institutions and capacities.