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P olitical scientists used to view patronage politics as an unwelcome legacy of traditional societies, something that would give way to ‘programmatic politics’ as countries became more developed. 1 This modernist perspective, however, has been challenged over the past 20 years, as scholars have realised that patronage politics is alive and well in many of the world’s most economically developed societies, including Italy, Belgium, Austria, Japan and the United States, and that there seem to be many good reasons to think that it will not diminish any time soon (Piattoni 2001; Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007). In the United States a hundred years of good government movements, anti-corruption initiatives and civil service reforms have made a dent in political patronage, but have failed to put an end to it. Tellingly, in August 2003 the Chairman of the Democratic Party in Philadelphia warned thousands of city employees that if the Republican candidate was elected as mayor, their jobs would go to Republicans. 2 There are many reasons for patronage to persist. Electoral systems which place a high premium on voters’ assessments of individual candidates, as opposed to proportional representation systems in which voters vote for a party list, are more likely to encourage politicians to differentiate themselves from each other by delivering patronage