Paul D. Kenny

The Origins of Patronage Politics: State Building, Centrifugalism, and Decolonization

This article develops a two-part theory that accounts for both the origins and the persistence of patronage politics. First, greater centrifugal and disintegrative pressures at key moments in the state-building process give local elites more opportunity to institutionalize patronage at the subnational level. Second, decentralized patronage systems are more resistant to reform than centralized ones. Case studies of India and Ceylon illustrate how variation in centrifugal pressures allowed subnational elites to capture the state in the former but not the latter. Further data from the British Empire shows that greater centrifugal pressures faced by British colonies at the time of decolonization are correlated with the persistence of higher levels of patronage over time.

Colonial rule, decolonisation, and corruption in India

This paper posits that the varied legacies of colonial rule and decolonisation can explain interstate variation in the institutionalisation of corruption in post-independence India. It concludes that the relative freedom from state capture after independence depended on two conditions: (1) the institutionalisation of bureaucratic autonomy prior to independence and (2) the survival of the disruption of decolonisation by an autonomous bureaucracy to be utilised by new representative governments following independence. These conditions were generally not met across India with the exception of the southern state of Kerala.

The Meaning of Torture

Despite being the subject of much recent scholarly work, torture remains an ambiguous concept. As recent legal arguments have made clear, such vagueness has important and immediate political consequences. This article makes a number of contributions towards resolving this ambiguity. First, it argues that the distinction between physical and psychological abuse is unwarranted. Second, it puts forward a logical basis for the distinction between torture and legally permissible punishments like incarceration. Third, it distinguishes between torture and related concepts like cruelty or sadism by stressing the instrumentality of torture. Ultimately, torture is defined as the systematic and deliberate infliction of severe pain or suffering on a person over whom the actor has physical control, in order to induce a behavioral response from that person.

The Structure of Ethnic Inequality and Ethnic Voting

Why do some ethnic groups vote along ethnic lines while others do not? In this article, we theorize that the level of ethnic voting depends, partially, on how ethnicity interacts with economic cleavages. Specifically, we argue that between–ethnic group inequality (BGI) increases ethnic voting and that its effect strengthens as within–ethnic group inequality (WGI) decreases. We thus posit that the full structure of ethnic inequality, not only between-group differences, matters for ethnic voting. After presenting our argument, we conduct the first cross-national test of whether the effect of between-group inequality on ethnic voting is conditional on the level of inequality within ethnic groups. Our analysis employs group-level data on 200 ethnic groups from 65 countries. We find strong support for our hypothesis: BGI increases ethnic voting, but its effect is conditional on WGI.