The chapter begins by describing the presidents relations with Congress, backed the threat of presidential vetoes on one side and impeachment on the other. It then traces the rise of the federal bureaucracy as an independent policymaker, asking whether and to what extent presidential power, rule of law norms, and bureaucratic incentives can ensure broadly democratic outcomes. The chapter concludes with a detailed discussion of the Presidents War Powers, the dynamics of wartime elections, and the Executives alarming authority to impose emergency measures without Congress.

Following Peters’ typology, we describe patronage appointments in Mongolia as political agents. We trace the development of Mongolia’s civil service from ancient into contemporary times. We emphasize the importance of political factions within the two dominant parties and the lack of a programmatic focus of the parties as the basis for the important role that patronage plays in the Mongolian hybrid presidential-parliamentary political system. We use patronage appointments in the diplomatic service as a case study of practices. Since factions within the two dominant parties are defined by personal ties rather than ideological orientation, we conclude that patronage appointments primarily act as political agents of these factions.

Patronage is a broad concept that can be used to describe such practices as clientelism and corruption. More specifically, this chapter considers party patronage where political parties ‘appoint individuals to (non-elective) positions in the public and semi-public sector’ (Kopecký et al, 2016). The research builds on the widening global database that measures the scope and depth of party patronage by examining public sector appointments in Central Asian countries. Of specific interest is why authoritarian states engage in patronage appointment practices when the dominant parties are already inextricably linked to the political elite. The study uses Kazakhstan as the site of enquiry and, through proxy indicators, extends the geography to consider Central Asia as a whole. We find the scope and depth of party patronage crosses all key policy sectors and reaches from the top to the lower tiers of governance. Looking at the trends for Central Asian countries since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, party patronage shows no signs of abating.

Extant literature on Chinese elite politics tend to argue that Chinese officials work under a political system very different from a western-Weberian bureaucracy. Factional patron-client relationship is considered a dominant factor affecting political appointment of high-level officials. However, prior findings have been mainly based on governors of provincial or prefectural jurisdictions or central committee members. State Council ministers and vice-ministers are largely missing in the previous analysis. Our research examines State Council ministers and vice-ministers under the administration of President Xi Jinping. This high-level bureaucrat group arguably is most comparable to the political appointees in Weberian bureaucracies. We systematically analyze their types of patronage along the policy-politics divide and loyalty basis. We also bring in the dimension of expertise to further identify the extent of professionalization of Chinese ministers. We find a variety of patronage existing among Chinese ministers. Political loyalty is only one kind of the patronage affecting personnel configurations of the State Council.

The Earl of Leicester’s Men were the dominant adult playing company of the early Elizabethan stage before the Queen’s Men. In addition to being the leading court revels company for nearly two decades, Leicester’s Men were also responsible for mapping out the touring circuits used by later companies and for establishing the first major playhouses near London. This book details the history of this company, building on decades of established scholarship, while also offering a raft of new discoveries from primary sources. Parish records help to unlock the origins of the company within London, and this background is shown to inform the company’s responses to the circumstances that having one of the most powerful nobles of the era as a patron presented. Their stable familial and parochial networks enabled them to tour extensively while also expanding their theatrical capital closer to London. This capital allowed them to thrive as court performers and as innovators of the playhouse business.

The Earl of Leicester’s Men were the dominant adult playing company of the early Elizabethan stage before the Queen’s Men. In addition to being the leading court revels company for nearly two decades, Leicester’s Men were also responsible for mapping out the touring circuits used by later companies and for establishing the first major playhouses near London. This book details the history of this company, building on decades of established scholarship, while also offering a raft of new discoveries from primary sources. Parish records help to unlock the origins of the company within London, and this background is shown to inform the company’s responses to the circumstances that having one of the most powerful nobles of the era as a patron presented. Their stable familial and parochial networks enabled them to tour extensively while also expanding their theatrical capital closer to London. This capital allowed them to thrive as court performers and as innovators of the playhouse business.

The Islamic Republic relies on a number of distinct but related institutional clusters to maintain power. This include the institutional means through which the state politically incorporates social groups into its orbit; institutional mechanisms of control; a number of “veto players”; those institutions that help maintain the system; the deep state; intra-elite competition; and, patronage and clientelism.

Chapter 2 introduces the case study at the heart of this book, the Theater an der Ruhr, and traces its institutional formation in the post-industrial Ruhr valley. This chapter builds on archival material and fieldwork in the archives of the Theater an der Ruhr in the theatre studies collection on Schloss Wahn in Cologne, suggesting new ways for combining ethnographic and historiographic methods for studying the institutionalisation of theatres. Documenting how its founders negotiated federal patrons and municipal funding, this chapter explores the political economy of public theatres and how they articulate their own forms of ‘artistic critique’ against the economisation of cultural production (Boltanski and Chiapello[1999]). It also describes, on the basis of a series of interviews and founding contracts and critical reception at the time, how and why the founders of the Theater an der Ruhr created an institutional structure that facilitates long phases of rehearsals, analysing its underpinning by an avant-garde understanding of ‘autonomous artistic creation’ irreducible to profit.

Anthony Baleߣs essay takes up recent scholarship on the historicity and production of The Book of Margery Kempe and on international influences on Kempeߣs piety and devotional practices. He argues that while the Book itself presents Kempe as an outsider, repeatedly repudiated by communities, and as disruptive, a ߢqueerߣ influence, collaboration is central to it. The essay recovers three earthly communities with which Kempe and her Book successfully engaged: Franciscan, Bridgettine, and monastic, considering questions of literacy, education, and cultural prestige. Kempeߣs experience in the Holy Land, Bale shows, was indebted to her integration into the Franciscan-led pilgrimage community, where she ultimately gained a high and holy reputation. The essay demonstrates that Bridgettine communities and patronage networks in Rome and at Syon also shaped Kempeߣs spiritual experience, while in Norfolk, a textual community including preachers and confessors formed around her. Following Kempeߣs death, manuscript annotation and printing history suggest a community of engaged readers who responded affectively to her spirituality.

An important feature of Iran’s political economy is the variety of opportunities it provides, through which individuals and groups can accrue economic benefits from and through the state. At the broadest level, the Iranian economy cannot be said to be in a healthy state. The Iranian economy is structurally unhealthy. But the economy’s maladies are products of, and also contributing factors to, means of personal enrichment for those with the right political connections. There are a number of areas to focus on, including the strong connections between the state and bazaari merchants; the perverse consequences of resource curses such as overreliance on oil and rampant corruption; the state’s efforts at various welfare schemes and the impulse toward statist economics; and the processes and consequences of pulling back from statism through privatization. All of these developments have combined to undermine the economy’s developmental potential. They have also coalesced to provide multiple means of patronage and clientelism in which the state plays a critical facilitating role. As such, Iran’s economy, diseased and underperforming as it is, provides important sources of support and resilience for the state.

The rich textual history of Syon Abbey, the only English house of St Birgitta of Swedenߣs Order of St Saviour, is the focus of this essay. Although there is limited evidence of English Bridgettine nuns authoring their own texts, St Birgitta, Syon Abbey, and its community of nuns as well as monks had profound and multiple influences on womenߣs literary culture in fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century England. While the significance of Syon within the late medieval English cultural landscape cannot be overemphasised, its (textual) community is also representative of the intricacies of womenߣs literary culture. Syon women, including as well as superiors aristocratic lay women with close ties to the abbey, were engaged in the commissioning of texts. The Syon community, led by Abbess Elizabeth Gibbs, was quick to exploit the new technology of printing, and also supported by the patronage of wealthy noble women, such as Lady Margaret Beaufort. However, the textuality of the abbey expanded beyond these powerful women to include the wider community of Syon nuns, and beyond England into continental Europe.

Chapter 4 consists of an introduction to the discourses and ideologies of patronage and benefaction and to the ways in which they are appropriated throughout the Apocalypse. Across ancient Mediterranean societies, one of the primary functions of the king consisted of distributing benefits to subjects, material and otherwise, in order to establish loyalty amongst subjects as well as power that accrued therefrom, a pattern which is best understood within broader systems of patronage and benefaction. A survey of the general contours of personal, imperial, and divine patronage and benefaction reveal how some of the most basic discursive strategies, attending socio-cultural-economic realities, and underlying ethical frameworks not only appear in Revelation but constitute the primary means of depicting the relationship between God, Lamb, and the followers thereof. In sum, Revelation depicts the Lamb as a royal benefactor who dispenses divine benefits on behalf of God.

This chapter argues that Thomas Nashe created a novel role for the urban writer that also assumed an innovative set of aesthetic principles that we associate with the metaphysical and that was directly antagonistic to humanist ideals. The dissatisfaction that Nashe felt at his lack of advancement as a member of the supposed intellectual elite contributed to his deeply skeptical outlook on reality and on the efficacy of humanist writing more specifically. As I newly detail in this chapter, the precise quotidian realities of Nashe’s existence in London in the 1590s pushed him to formulate a novel advocacy of contention even as he pushed away the noisiness of the urban public world, an entirely ambivalent stance towards the city embodied in Nashe’s obsession with corners. In formulating a writing approach that corresponded with his objections to Philip Sidney and Gabriel Harvey and to his urban reality, Nashe innovated his prose style into something less mimetic than affective, a style that foregrounded a speedy aimlessness, as well as a heterogeneous mixture of materialist images. Nashe’s prose thus takes up the very features that we now call the metaphysical.

Chapter 1 recovers the pastoral precedents for the culture that directly precipitated Cervantes’ first poems within the court of Isabel de Valois (Queen of Spain, 1560–1568), in which literary art forms and forms of cultural practice became intertwined in complex mimetic processes. From Theocritus, Vergil, Horace, Ovid, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Poliziano, and Sannazaro to Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan Boscán, and Jorge de Montemayor, the retreat of the pastoral was understood to be a device employed to encode and allegorize the private life and lived experience of the court which made poiesis possible. Drawing on archival records (relaciones) of life in the court, the diary kept by one of the queen’s ladies-in-waiting, and histories of Isabel’s reign, Chapter 1 explores the frequent and often improvisational imitation of various literary genres, including the romance of chivalry, by members of the court caught up in erotic entanglements which became the content of pastoral fiction. At the confluence of literary allegory and contemporary history, through the exchange of motes in the terrero, the palace became pastoral.

This chapter examines the economic pattern of the monastery built around the Memorial of Moses on Mount Nebo in the Roman province of Arabia (modern Jordan). After a topographical introduction of the site’s landscape and its physical environment, the agricultural production strategies of the monastic complex are taken into consideration. On one hand, particular attention is paid to the production facilities found in the monastery, such as wine presses and ovens for the preparation of bread, and on the other hand to the traces of agricultural tillage, the management of water resources, and religious and lay patronage. The analysis of seeds and palaeobotanical remains found in the latest archaeological excavations allow us to reflect on the possible diet of the monks and, consequently, on the crops grown in the monastic fields of the Nebo region.

This chapter is concerned about the role of elites in autocratic regimes. It focuses mainly on business and military elites and asks how autocracies can bind these actors to their inner sanctum. It reviews previous decades of research, highlighting the recent institutionalist turn in comparative authoritarianism, but also traces back debates about neo-patrimonialism, clientelism, patronage, and corruption. The chapter introduces the conceptual distinction between co-optation in formalized arenas like political parties and parliaments as well as in the shadowland of informality. It argues that intra-elite cohesion can be secured via reactive and preventive measures as well as by absorbing new members (widening) or by interweaving interests and instilling a feeling of reciprocity (deepening) among the elite members. The chapter ends by explicating concrete operationalization advice for empirical research.