Introduction

Italy and Spain are often seen as “natural” comparators. The apparent similarities in their cultural, social, economic, and even political development have not escaped the attention of social scientists, and in Spain in particular Italy has been seen as a useful model for speculating on future developments (see, for example, Linz 1967). In this chapter the justification for comparison is the apparently striking parallels between the development of clientelism in the recent history of the two states. In both cases, a passage from patronage to clientelism (Weingrod 1968) can be traced, and the contemporaneous emergence of corruption scandals in the early 1990s provides a further reason for investigating parallels between the two cases. The aim of this chapter is therefore to chart the evolution of clientelism in Italy and Spain, to examine the similarities and differences between them, and to offer tentative explanations for those similarities and differences.

We argue that to look at the “supply side” of clientelism alone is not enough. While rejecting, like Shefter (1994: xi, 22–25), an analysis of the “demand side” that blames clientelism exclusively on the “ethos” of given populations or given social classes, we still think that it is important to pay attention to the autonomous and induced transformations of society and, hence, to its greater or lesser vulnerability to the clientelist bid from party politicians. What the comparison between Italy and Spain tells us is that, even within similar historical-institutional contexts, the scope for clientelism can vary according to the receptivity of society to selective methods of electoral mobilization.