Exchanging Material Benefits for Political Support: A Comparative Analysis

This chapter presents a comparative study of Britain, the United States, and Israel, focusing on the exchange of private material benefits for political support. Such practices have been dealt with by various scholars under the heading of "machine politics" or "clientelism." While the use of material benefits by political elites is considered legitimate on the collective level, it is considered increasingly illegitimate as one moves down to the individual level, where it usually contravenes accepted rules of the democratic process and falls under the headings of "political corruption." A theory proposed by Heidenheimer involves the development of the elites' structure and power: according to this theory, electoral corruption and specifically the offering of material inducements arose where electoral assemblies, political parties, or other political instruments of mass mobilization were powerful prior to the development of a centralized, powerful, bureaucratized civil service. Conversely, it was curbed where fully developed bureaucracies antedate political parties.