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This research emerged from the beHef that merely economic explanations of rent seeking were too narrow and an interdisciplinary approach was needed to understand historical structural factors that contribute to particularistic exchanges. Rent-seeking and particularistic ties are almost always explained from a strictly neoc1assical perspective which tend to be reductionist approaches that fail to explain why sorne states will be rent-seeking while others will not. Moreover, other frameworks that analyze state-civil society interaction do so without taking into account particularistic state-civil society interaction. Thus, there is a need to explain such particularistic ties in a comparative institutional framework. My dissertation research was undertaken on two associations in Turkey, namely the Turkish Red Crescent (Kizilay) and AKUT (a search and rescue team), in order to understand the dynamics of the relationship between a particularistic state and civil society associations. The TRC was chosen because it was involved in particularistic exchanges and functioned as an institution of the state, which meant that it partook in the state failure the state in Turkey faced in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake in 1999. The Marmara earthquake was devastating not only physically in terms of the damage it caused, but also socially in terms of the extent of the failure of state institutions it exposed and the extent of criticisms it unleashed. The immediate chaos that ensued in the aftermath of the earthquake was marked by the" absence of the state". The failure of the state provoked an unprecedented civil reaction and mobilization. AKUT, the second case of the …