transitional clientelism

Against the norm: the transitionalsymbiosis of ‘grassroots clientelism’and ‘rural citizenship’

Zografia Bika

Abstract

Clientelism has predominantly been represented in the literature as an expressionof backwardness and corruption with little attention being paid to the question ofhow clientelism has changed over the years. In contrast, this paper examines theparticulars of state intervention in the agrarian economy with respect to clientelismand exposes the illogicality of contrasting patron-client relationships with citizen-ship. The historical focus is on the ways in which, in the course of post-dictatorshipconsolidation in rural Greece throughout the 1980s, the transformation of tradi-tional brokerage-based clientelism into the bureaucratic clientelism of the politicalparties actually enhanced the institutions and practices of ‘rural citizenship’. Com-parative qualitative research on the driving force of agrarian change shows howThessalian villagers made the transition from being socially excluded subjects tosocially included clients in two lowland village communities and the role played bya dynamic state bureaucracy.

Introducing the analytical perspective

By cutting across theoretical traditions, political clientelism is conceptualisedin this paper as a remarkable method of mutually beneficial socio-economictransaction between unequal parties that is played out by collective or indi-vidual actors. In other words, clientelism refers to the links through which thevillage broker or single villager is linked vertically to the wider society as‘gatekeepers’ or ‘individualised clients’ respectively (Lemarchand and Legg,1972; Goussios, 1995; Sotiropoulos, 1994). This paper’s comparative ethno-graphic case study research in Thessaly, rural Greece, treats clientelism asan essential part of the growing trend of state integration and capitalistpenetration, as the latter trends are evidenced by Kasimis and Papadopoulos(1997), with special attention to the villagers’ external relations, material com-mitments and shared understandings. It adopts a critical cultural politicaleconomy perspective (Sayer, 2001), incorporating an actor-oriented approachthat views village power structures as regulated, distributed and acted upon by

The Sociological Review, 59:2 (2011)© 2011 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2011 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review. Publishedby Blackwell Publishing Inc., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,02148, USA.

different actors (Marsden, 1992; Buttel, 2001) and brings together ethnogra-phy, history and embeddedness in order to constitute a more culturally sensi-tive and less problem-driven appreciation of economic relations (Bika, 2007;Narotzky, 2007; Green, 2008).

However, this political economy differs from the ‘top-down’ approach ofneo-Marxist analyses of Greek rural transformation (Mouzelis, 1976; 1978;Vergopoulos, 1978) that primarily recognized collective agency caught up in anunequal macro-exchange and examined individual farmers as undifferentiatedproducts of institutional systems. It is theoretically closer to the so-called‘peasant studies’ (Moore, 1966; Wolf, 1969; Scott, 1985) that manage to avoida universalistic conception of the ‘seeds’ of the capitalist mode of productionor social exchange, which are seen instead as conjectural, actor-centric andhistorically-specific (Brenner, 1976; Narotzky, 2007; Bika, 2007; Hung, 2008). Italso resists the ‘persistence through differentiation’ neo-populist thesis and itsendogenous development models (for a review, see Kasimis and Papadopou-los, 1997; Bika, 2007) that focus on the micro (internal) characteristics (mostimportantly, the pluriactivity and heterogeneous employment practices) ofGreek family farm adjustment to post-war capitalism through the positivistmedium of locally-based survey research. By contrast, the paper’s theoreticalstance embraces the fuzziness of the distinction between scales and especiallymicro- and macro-level interpretation (Sayer, 2000; 2001; Bika, 2007) or, interms of rhetorical oppositions, between peasant particularities and govern-ment discourse. This framework rejects the epistemology that earlier on sepa-rated political economy analytically from the ‘voice’ at the rural grassroots andits evaluative judgements, leaves behind the concept of the state-as-the-external ‘other’ and examines villagers’ lived experiences in order to detect‘systemic regularity’ and the organisation of cultural difference (Sayer, 2000;2001: 689) – thus striving to reconstruct how state intervention has beenintertwined with village group interests.

In particular, this paper: charts the slow transformation in the perception atthe rural grassroots of clientelism, studies situated patron-client interactionsbetween rural actors embedded in particular experiences, and thus attempts toresolve an impasse in theories of clientelism by looking at its practice. It offershistorical evidence against the conventional underestimation – in functional-ist, modernisation and anthropological accounts – (Banfield, 1958; Campbell,1964; Lemarchand and Legg, 1972; Mouzelis, 1978; Herzfeld, 2003; Schneiderand Schneider, 2005; Mattina, 2007) of the positive aspects of clientelism inthe ‘South’ as an alternative form of civil resistance, albeit with a few recentexceptions in Latin American research (Lazar, 2004; Schneider and Zuniga-Hamlin, 2005). Both Kaufman (1974) and Soiffer and Howe (1982) agreedmore than two decades ago on the conceptualisation of clientelism as beingneither static nor a cultural survival in its empirical application. Beyond con-ventional wisdom, this paper shows how a less structured and more processualexchange of diverse services and resources takes place among asymmetricallyreciprocal parties over a long period and how clientelistic ties metamorphose

Against the norm

349© 2011 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2011 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review

from being structural creators of centre-periphery dependency to those ofsubjective and historically-specific civil connectedness.

To evaluate critically the positive aspects of clientelism, the paper examinesin practice the way in which grassroots clientelism has given way to citizenshipwithin the increasing modernisation of the Greek countryside in distinct his-torical periods. This process is, however, against the norm that prescribesuniversalistic and undifferentiated relations as being a prerequisite for citizen-ship. Such a normative transcendence occurs amidst the onslaught of moder-nity itself that is conceptualised here as detaching systems from the lifeworld(ie the world as given in experience), disembedding economy from cultureand pursuing progress (Sayer, 2001; Bromley, 1991). In overview: before com-mencing the analysis, the extant literature on clientelism and citizenship isreviewed and an introduction to the empirical study in terms of methodologyand historical background presented, then a wealth of qualitative data onvillagers’ perceptions, conditions and relations is deciphered and conclusionsdrawn.

Greek clientelism revisited

In classical functionalist anthropology (Campbell, 1964), the Sarakatsani tran-shumant shepherd community is seen as being integrated piecemeal with thewider Greek society along unique lines of personal, moral and familial obli-gation, and patron-client relationships.This perspective’s main collective actorremains the extended family and its inevitable inclinations, with Sara-katsani attitudes towards brokers and clients being represented as timelessand unchanging. Clientelism as a heterogeneous and fluid cultural reality isvirtually non-existent here. On the other hand, neo-Marxist thought hasexplored the relationship of class structure and clientelistic political practicesin Greece. Thus Mouzelis (1978) distinguishes between functional evolution-ism, in favour of dual models that move from traditional clientelism to modernclass politics, and the Marxist application of the mode of production concept tosocieties more or less favourable to patronage. Spourdalakis’s (1988) counter-argument is also prominent in its claim that clientelism cannot be understoodin class terms alone. Changes in government action, resources, politicalprocess, dependencies and class relations are responsible for the transforma-tion of clientelistic practices rather than just changes in the articulation ofcompeting modes of production. Finally, Herzfeld’s (2003) anthropologicalaccount of everyday (centre-periphery) responses to Greek nationalistic dis-course offers an alternative view of clientelism in the face of the centre’smonopolisation of nationhood, ownership of history and manipulation of‘moral economy’.

Overall, it is as much the structure of whole communities as self-perpetuating ‘bounded systems’ versus the capitalist mode of production andits collective (or institutional actors) – which bear the burden of classical

Zografia Bika

350 © 2011 The Author. The Sociological Review © 2011 The Editorial Board of The Sociological Review

sociological explanation of clientelistic practices – as the anthropologicalemergence of new localisms that reproduces the dichotomous thinking ofclient-based particularism versus citizen-related universalism. Village life istreated more as the politics of community (group) membership rather than asthe private actions of individuals with their sense of justice. But the course ofgroup development as the product of individual action, judgement and entre-preneurial drives is largely ignored (Boissevain, 1968). In this conceptualframework clientage relations are examined only negatively, as destructiveforces in the public sphere responsible for backwardness, and thus are dis-missed by mainstream scholars as some sort of ‘civil casualty’ in the process ofmodern interest formation. However, at the local level, clientelism practicallyexists everywhere, not restricted to traditional or underdeveloped societies. Inpractice, what varies, is the nature of clientage relations (collective, aggressive,personalised, authoritarian, bureaucratic, or grassroots), their level of applica-tion (individual, family, village, regional or state) and their actors’ degree ofsocial integration (monopolistic, oligarchic or pluralistic).

To specify, there is a theoretical consensus among Greek political writers(Mouzelis, 1978; Spourdalakis, 1988; Lyrintzis, 1984, 1987; Sotiropoulos, 1994)that post-war Greek clientelism gradually became less ‘oligarchic’ and more‘party-oriented’ as the capitalist mode of production increasingly dominatedand ‘orientations, allegiances and resources shifted from the local tothe national level’ (Mouzelis, 1978: 487). In a macro-historical framework,Marantzidis and Mavrommatis’s typology of clientelism (1999) serves heuris-tic purposes. It pivots on the main axis of defensive-aggressive clientelism, withthe former being concerned with the minimalist avoidance of the deteriorationof socially excluded clients’ social status (rights) and the latter with the pro-motion of upward social mobility of more socially integrated clients. Marantzi-dis and Mavrommatis (1999) used the case of Gypsies in the small town ofSofades (also in Thessaly) to explore how the defensive type of clientelismreproduces the framework of social exclusion that the Gypsies experience.Thus this paper also takes on the idea of aggressive clientage relations whichare seen as an instrument for co-optation (Gould, 1996).

The rise of rural citizenship

The age-old divisions between liberalism and republicanism, with the former’sunderstanding of the citizen as an individual bearer of universalistic rights andthe latter’s as one who actively participates in public life, have dominated thediscussion of the rights and duties of the citizen (Dahrendorf, 1974; Lister,1998). A broad definition of citizenship is embraced here, which goes beyonda received membership of the nation (voting, military service or nationalisticdiscourse) to public participation in exercising and changing rights and obli-gations (Roberts, 1995: 184). The notion of citizenship has been contested in adifferent fashion to that of clientelism, with the spatial understanding of civil

Against the norm


membership based on common residence wrestling with that of cultural heri-tage and its shared symbolism in a ‘borderless’ world (Glenn, 2000). Citizen-ship can no longer be singly associated with nationhood, rationality, civicmemory, psychological requisites of ‘social commitment’, urban connotations(ie inhabitant of a town) or any other territorially based and undifferentiatednotions of community (Dahrendorf, 1974; Nisbet, 1974; Dagger, 1981; Portis,1986; Turner, 1990, 2001; Lister, 1998). Most importantly, the single-mindedembodiment of citizenship in a national state has given way to the newlyformed realities of dual citizenship, consumer citizenship, European citizen-ship, environmental citizenship, global citizenship and rural citizenship amongothers.As Parker and Ravenscroft inform us (2001: 389),‘what we appear to beexperiencing is a wholesale deconstruction of the very idea of universal rights’and its replacement with (common) interest-driven rights and different typesof citizenship.This is the unmasking of rural citizenship that is understood hereto refer to differentiated rural actors who share equal status (rights), and torun in transitional harmony with ‘grassroots clientelism’ at the local level.

It was first T.H. Marshall’s anglophile and evolutionary perspective (1950)on the historical emergence of citizenship, ie a successive emergence of civil(freedom of speech/thought/faith), political (free elections), and social rights(a modicum of economic welfare), which failed to put an emphasis on ‘anotion of social struggles as the central motor for citizenship’ (Turner, 1990:193). However, as Turner informs us (1990: 195), ‘the character of citizenshipvaries systematically between different societies’ or, as he adds later on(2001: 191), ‘citizenship has assumed very different forms in Europe in rela-tion to different patterns of capitalist development’. The development ofvarious forms of citizenship (including rural) thus becomes possible as theresult of mixing passive and active rights; it is no longer an ideal-type situ-ation. In the ‘making of citizenship’, the importance of universalistic rightsbestowed upon members and the varieties of their particularistic interests iscommensurate with the impact of achieving active citizenship on individuals’local loyalties, commitments and trust. In this context, grassroots clientelismcan connect experientially the ‘equality of opportunity’ that citizenshippromises (state) with the ‘inequality of position’ (economy) that class devel-opment brings into group life (village community). Class is used here in theWeberian way of viewing social action in terms of individual motives, com-petition and life-chances.

The process of rural citizenship in post-war rural Thessaly emerges here asa set of local/regional class relationships, which acts as a facilitator of civilsociety that is temporarily mediated by grassroots clientelism. The role of theincoherent Greek state is reduced to reconciling the wider forces of localismand globalism. This is an analysis of rural citizenship from below whichemerged as complementary to social/class struggles over increased stateresources for governance, welfare, education, bureaucracy and democracy. Itthus questions Marshall’s argument (1950: 40) that the capitalist class systemrequires a system of citizenship for legitimation – the latter being itself an

Zografia Bika


outcome of the ‘warring principles of the state and the economy’ in Somers’swords (1993: 610) and counter-argues that other intermediary, institutionallyembedded and reactive forces might also be at play. This paper stresses thatwhich differentiates individual villagers from each other and how these dif-ferentiated interests integrate villagers into wider society and facilitate activecitizenship. Most importantly for this paper’s argument, these citizens arenot on their way to self-denial (for example, patriotism, nationalism, civicduty, Christianity, tradition or morals) as opposed to what is somehowassumed to be the case for national citizenship by the liberal tradition. Thesecitizens are just as likely to rise against the national state for particularisticreasons (distributive justice), as fight in its defence for universalistic premises(rural immobilities). But most importantly, they are able to act as citizens,no longer citizens-to-be, in the encounter of state and community amidstnation-building.

Research methods

The findings of this paper are based on a year’s participant observation thatwas carried out in the Thessalian plain, a predominantly agricultural areawhere average farm size is among the highest in Greece, and which is charac-terised by technologically sophisticated methods of production and heavilysubsidised and intensive arable cultivation. It is a comparative study of twolowland communities of irrigated cotton producers, reputed to be relativelyviable and economically successful and sharing the same topography, externalenvironment, and population size (1,500 inhabitants). Whilst the first village,named Kotsari, has a long history and residency in the region, Zobas, the other,is quite recent and was constituted in 1925 by Bulgarian immigrants of Greekorigin. In the days of land reform (1920s), Zobas’s family units were allotted6.9 ha1 of expropriated land of relatively poor quality, whilst Kotsari receivedonly 4.5 ha of arable land per family unit by virtue of its higher populationdensity and better opportunities for irrigation. Half a century later highlydifferentiated property groups were found accurately to portray the variationsbetween sizes (from small landholdings of 1–3 ha to the lager ones of 120 ha).

The collected data comprised 60 oral history interviews from different ruralhouseholds, which were equally split between the two villages, alongside archi-val work (scrutinising the minutes of the communal councils in each villagesince 1950). Overall, less than half of the sample was interviewed on a one-to-one basis (25 individual interviews), there were 6 group interviews in publicplaces, as well as conversations in home situations with more than one familymember participating (29 family interviews). The study searched for validityvia the comparative method and the use of marginal cases, but also focused onmen in these household interviews (only 7 interviews out of 60 were primarilyconducted with women), this was because men still strongly dominate localpolitics and decision-making (including the coffee-shops and community

Against the norm


councils) in rural Greece. A type of snowball sampling was employed, whichinvolved using a number of key informants – insiders – to identify a list of over60 persons who were typical of a differentiated community membership. Dif-ferent variables were used so that each respondent was accurately placed inthe economic setting (labour status, occupation, access to land – ie land own-ership and land rent) and his or her partial account was adequately assessed asbeing from a different status situation (gender, kinship, neighbourhood, gen-eration, education, leadership and partnership scheme). A systematic andcareful sampling was made to ensure contact with a range of economic con-ditions, kinship ties, and generations.

Linking policy, locality and history

Three major political events mark the post-war history of rural Greece: thecivil war of 1946–49 followed by a victorious right-wing regime of ‘repressiveparliamentarianism’ (Mouzelis, 1976), the dictatorship years of 1967–74, andEU membership since 1981 – with its Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) –accompanied by political pluralism and democratisation. In the 1950s, the stateand policy-makers began to regard the agricultural sector as a fundamentalcomponent in the development process. After the Second World War, Greekagriculture thus operated as a sector increasingly complementary to the urbaneconomy, whose main functions were to ensure a cheap food supply and offera labour reservoir (Vergopoulos, 1978; Maraveyas, 1992). The extraction ofagricultural surplus through state-imposed ceilings on the price of food wasadopted as the only strategy for the much-desired industrial development ofthe country.

In the 1960s, a new government of ‘the Centre Union’ (1963–1965) intro-duced a greater social awareness of agricultural policies, an orientationtowards the improvement of living conditions of farmers, and a block on ruralexodus. Price policies became more significant and were targeted on thereimbursement of agriculture for its previous losses which resulted from theartificially suppressed food prices of earlier years (Maraveyas, 1992; Karampe-lias, 1989). For the period of 1962–67 (including a series of caretaker govern-ments), these price policies annually absorbed 8.8% of the state budget(Maraveyas, 1992: 90–2), while in 1953–61, the same figure barely exceeded2.2%. Such state intervention focused for the first time on agricultural income,whilst still having an eye on the need to keep down the cost-of-living index.However, the task of promoting a cost-effective system of production throughstructural modernisation was left on hold.

This embryonic trend was then considerably amplified during the Dictator-ship (1967–1974) by the Colonels’ comprehensive state-driven intervention atthe local level. In 1968 all previous farmers’ long and medium term debts tothe Agricultural Bank of Greece (ATE) were written off by the Colonels, andfor the first time cheap credit (interest rates of 2%) was given out more freely

Zografia Bika


by ATE as many applications were only vaguely scrutinised. Moreover, ‘theabolition of the price-support prices for wheat, and its replacement by asystem of minimum intervention prices, thus the government intervenes onlyif crop prices fall below a fixed minimum price, allowed for a more systematicplay of market forces in agriculture’, as Yannopoulos adds (1972: 122). For thefirst time, the market became a key element in the countryside, which led to amore rational allocation of farming household resources.

In the election of October 1981 the Socialist Party (PASOK), capturedan absolute parliamentary majority to form the first socialist governmentin Greek history. According to Ioakimidis (in Williams, 1984: 47), PASOKwas almost branded by some commentators ‘as a party of “rural protest”precisely because of its widespread support among the rural population’. Inmacro-economic terms, government discourse and action changed quite dra-matically in the 1980s by increasingly using the ‘sense of community’ in itsrepertoire, whilst the state gained power by the populist repetition of pro-vision rather than by a series of ‘penalty shoot-outs’ and detached speeches,as was previously the case. ‘Expenditure related to the farming product rosesharply from 13.8% in 1974–1980, to 35% in 1981–1988, whilst expenditureon structural investment fell from 4.3% in 1974–1980, to 4% between 1981and 1989’ (Louloudis and Maraveyas, 1997: 272). In the pre-dictatorshipperiod there were direct benefits such as bonuses, credit and contractfarming that usually accompanied the few followers of the differential advicegiven exclusively by ‘visiting agronomists’ (agricultural extension officerswho acted as facilitators of new knowledge transfer to farmers), whereas inthe 1980s Thessalian villagers became eligible to enjoy standardised andmore inclusive benefits. In Thessaly, widely distributed ‘farm modernisationplans’ (EC Council Regulation 797/85 replaced by 2328/91, then by 950/97on Improving the Efficiency of Agricultural Structures and finally 1257/99 onSupport for Rural Development), compensatory allowances, guaranteedprices, and the availability of relevant information to large farmers who nowindividually consulted the agronomists by paying visits to their offices ontheir own initiative, signalled change.

In the 1990s, state protectionism and support for farming income beyondthe means of the national economy (with large and ever rising budget deficitsand debt) was no longer an option for politicians. ‘Uncritical adoption ofEuropeanization has thus substituted for a lack of domestic strategic policyplanning’ in rural development issues (Papadopoulos and Liarikos, 2007: 295).In this policy framework, the CAP-guaranteed prices and subsidised crops ofthe prosperity years of 1981–1989 gave way to national quota limits (supplycontrols) and the co-responsibility levy which penalised cotton over-production (from 1989). Consequently, falling cotton prices, public disappoint-ment and indignation led to inevitable conflict. According to Louloudis andMaraveyas (1997: 279), ‘in November 1996, the biggest agricultural unionprotest ever since the restoration of parliamentary democracy in Greece, tookplace (3,000 to 5,000 tractors blocked the roads in Thessaly)’. Thessalian

Against the norm


farmers united across villages, in an expression of citizenship as against villagecommunity, and learnt how to fight against an inconsiderate and unfair statefor what they perceived as their legitimate rights.

The impact of government action as localised discourse

Throughout this ebb-and-flow of modernisation the impact of governmentaction as localised discourse on Thessalian rural citizens’ mindset has not beena singular one and has diversified significantly over time. At first, the post-warhegemony of a nationalistic ideology (Pollis, 1987; Pantazopoulos, 2001) –which combined anti-communism, Orthodox Christianity and Greekness –socialised all villagers, after the view of peasant politics taken by Scott (1977:242), only marginally ‘to accept either their fate or the values that ordainedthat fate’. However, this repressive parliamentarianism benefited only thoseregarded as holding politically acceptable views and represented the norma-tive basis for creating biased enmities/loyalties to a particular cause. But by thepolitical hangover of 1974, this ideological hegemony was abolished by thenew democratic regime, a change which was sign-posted by the legalisation ofthe Communist Party (Act of 23-09-1974). Until the 1980s, many rural peoplefelt not only politically and ideologically ostracised by an authoritarian right-wing state, but ‘excluded from the fruits of the country’s increasing prosperityand the emergence of a consumer society’ (Clogg, 1992: 183). Clientelisticpractices changed hands from village brokers and local patrons operating onan undisputed personalised basis of favours and accommodations to the post-1981 local representatives of the parties who dealt with the satisfaction of theindividualist and sectoral type demands of the governing party members(Spourdalakis, 1988). By the early 1980s, the political parties, financed by thestrengthened state apparatus itself, dismissed the so-called ‘heads of thevillage’ from their duties as independent and localised gateways of state powerand directly financed the grassroots demands of their rural clients (the clien-tele chain was cropped).

Parochial politics (1946–1974)

In the early post-war period, the male village president and/or broker func-tioned both as a commanding officer within the village and as a collectiveclient to the outside world. He led the course of action towards goals alreadyset by the community as a whole whilst his power remained circumscribed bya lack of large-scale external funding. By using internal influence through histypical function as a trader, labour recruiter and moneylender, the villagepresident often gained certain MPs’ post-electoral political support. Thisenabled him to avoid other rivals operating as potential aggressors against hiscommunity as a totality and, consequently, protect his own personal interestsas the controlling hands at the point of entry for incoming financial aid. This

Zografia Bika


was the historical moment that the Marshall Plan (1947–52) was transferringlarge funds to the Greek countryside in order to accelerate the post-warrecovery.This was also the time when villagers could be gathered in the villagesquare and ‘ordered’ to perform in a certain way and the lack of institutiona-lised means for access to the state was omnipresent.And so villagers had to ‘liein wait for politicians passing by the national road’ to ask them for help asearthquake victims, as Nikos Vlasis, Zobas’s village president, admitted. Thistype of clientelistic practice was meant to be defensive and it prevented thepost-war Thessalian villagers from surmounting their subordinate isolationand consequently, socio-economic exclusion from the wider world. The earth-quake in 1954 represents an example of such practices. As this ex-villagepresident and flourmill owner in Zobas remembers:

I succeeded in supplying the villagers with free food aid for three years afterthe earthquake of 1954, mainly by using my contacts and abilities. No onewas left hungry. I gave each family a tin pot of olive oil in a period where itwas in such short supply that villagers measured olive oil in drops. Later,you can imagine how much the villagers wanted to keep me as villagepresident. I had said to them: ‘Do not be afraid, the earthquake will save us’,meaning that it will save them from poverty.

Until now, parochial communities had been comprised of second-classcitizens who were only allowed minimal claims and rights. As Zobas’s com-munity secretary explains, ‘when villagers used to come to the communityoffice, they took their hats off and if I told them that I was busy and couldnot help them immediately, then they would never be rude to me. Then, theywere afraid of us, state officials’. In a similar fashion, the villagers’ outcryagainst basic deprivation such as the lack of water supply in Kotsari wasnot consolidated into an organised movement against authority. Instead, ina self-acknowledged powerlessness mainfested into a call for religious inter-vention. This was their only perceptible form of resistance in a world ofparochial politics:

According to the document Y.M./1348 of the Social Welfare Ministry, adrilling machine for the water supply of our village could not be sent tous . . . Our community council then declared that they would resign as one,if this request remained unattended as they could no longer endure theday-to-day complaints and curses of their fellow villagers (Council Minutes,Kotsari, ‘25-04-1957’).

Villagers, especially those who were previously seen working as hiredlabour in the epoch of pre-mechanisation, only very slowly lost faith in their‘strong, durable personal bonds with the ex-“polyvalent”, but steady patrons’(Damianakos, 1997: 205). George Buras (communist and owner of 2.8 ha inKotsari) tells the story of the early post-war village electoral power:

Against the norm


We voted for whoever we thought was the most suitable for our villageinterests, we did not have political parties. Whoever was educated, capableand a good man was elected as the village president. Giannis Nikas waselected because he was ‘dynamic’, treated villagers to drinks in the coffee-shops, could stand security for them, and could also provide collateral andemployment, so one felt obliged to vote for him.

The absence of party politics at the local level was paramount and found inclear agreement with what the council minutes (Zobas, 10-08-1952) reportedas being responsible for the early post-war dismissal of the village president:

The village president was mixed up in scandalous politics and campaignedfor the political party ‘Greek Rally’ by announcing propaganda on hisloudspeakers and by sending campaign letters, as official paperwork, tothe community council . . . He even appointed his incompetent supporteras community secretary after dismissing the previous one without evenconsulting the councillors.

However, the early post-war oligarchic parliamentary Greek state whichremained in power by systematic exclusion and patron-client control ofintroverted lowland Thessalian communities gave way to a centralised dicta-torship predicated upon the control of structures and the creation of uniformindividuals. The Colonels were not ideologically in favour of an emergenceof powerful individuals constituting a peasant bourgeoisie because theysubscribed to the schematic notions of populist corporatism and an undiffer-entiated ‘people’. The Colonels’ breakdown of old hierarchies with the intro-duction of infrastructure, ample credit, electrification (1968) and other homeimprovements, launched the process of freeing the individual from patriarchalrule provided that the Patriarch’s time-honoured judgement was no longer avaluable guide to the most appropriate economic action in times of invasivechange (Bika, 2012). The Dictatorship offered not only cheap credit to thepeasants, but also showed them that they could free themselves from theirdependence on the local elite. During the Dictatorship, however, an increasingnumber of villagers became familiar with the widespread official totalitarianhierarchy and learnt how to use it in order to better their own interests. Theregime equipped them with these means, and in doing so, paradoxically pro-vided them with protection against an abusive state apparatus. The politicallymoderate peasant thus became an agent seeking economic success, by follow-ing a uniform state-driven process and perceived the military regime as asimple shift of the post-war autocratic power from political to military hands.‘The regime attacked only the left-wing MPs, affecting the heads of the villagesand the party leaders’ (Nestoras Tezokas, owner of 5 ha and Kotsari’sex-village president of the left-wing persuasion). It left the silent masses undis-turbed, allowing them to go on with their lives as long as they behavedproperly as ‘real’ or at least ‘supposed’ supporters of the regime.

Zografia Bika


If you had guts you could go to the Agricultural Bank and get whateveryou wanted. State officials had to perform in their jobs provided that theirposts were not permanent at that time. If you applied for a loan, the bankemployees owed to provide services. If they did not and you were entitledto what you applied for, you could complain to their superiors. Everybodywas scared; so they did their jobs perfectly. Once a villager applying for aloan got rejected but said: You gave the loan to this person and not to me,so I will complain to the regional director. Employees panicked and wentout to stop him. He ended up getting his loan with no further problems. Onecould find justice then (Tasos Notaras, owner of 10.7 ha in Kotsari).

It was, ironically, only during the Colonels’ period that villagers’ economicclaims were legitimated with formal justification, even though other liberalrights, such as the freedom of speech, were abolished. What should not beoverlooked in this period is that the opposed parties were always comparablein terms of their loyalty to the nationalist ideology of the regime in order tobe allowed to disagree. In the early 1970s, the ‘fall’ of the traditional sense ofcommunity development was also initiated when ‘the Greek central govern-ment started to take all the main communal services into its own control, inorder to place its own appointees, who would then influence the people’ asDaoutopoulos (1991: 134) describes. The totalitarian regime encouraged thestandardisation of administration and frightened the state officials whonow that they had to give an explanation for their actions, could not fail todeliver the central government’s will and help the people reach the ‘Colonels’promised land’. Stelios Samaritidis’ vivid account of his days as Zobas’appointed village vice-president is illustrative:

The water supply was once disrupted, so I was waiting on the main roadwhen, by chance, a Major passed by. I explained to him ‘I cannot find anyoneto repair the damage’. His answer was ‘Go get the village president andimmediately dig it all up yourselves’ and so within two hours we managed torepair it.

The everlasting need to call on somebody else’s resources retained itsclientelist might in post-war Thessaly, but slowly faced a transformation. Thismaterialised in the form of the gradual replacement of the broker’s paternal-istic protection from a semi-capitalist articulation of the post-war local systemwith its exterior, by populist understandings of the modern state’s ‘favour-ability’ and the rural citizen’s right to make a claim on it. At this time, thetraditional ‘heads of the villages’ had already lost their power as local employ-ers due to mechanisation, whilst a peasant’s self-sufficiency had decreasedcommensurately. This also coincided, not by chance, with the abolition of theindigenous institution of compulsory unpaid local labour for the building-upof the necessary village infrastructure as a result of increasing monetization.As stated in the minutes of Kotsari’s community council (3-11-1976):

Against the norm


‘this institution discriminates against villagers in comparison with city dwell-ers, treating the first as second class citizens on the assumption that villagerslack pecuniary means. However, the time has arrived that villagers cannow pay their contributions to the state with money instead of labour’. The‘greatest among equals’ early post-war leadership principle, accompanied by amonopoly of local power in the Thessalian rural context of antagonistic deal-ings with the Greek state, had gradually given way to the populist rhetoric ofGreek state intervention as an opportunity for access to increased state-levelresources.

The early democratic experiment (1975–1996)

It was thus the processes of individualised property and accumulated invest-ment during the late 1970s that provided ordinary villagers with opportunitiesto save (realisation of self), to develop an agenda for their rights and to haveconfidence in their ability to make claims for things and plan ahead. Theserights were admitted as valid and true in the 1980s when Thessalian villagerslearnt how to exercise them as part of their emerging social mobility aspira-tions via an aggressive type of clientage relations prevailing under conditionsof EU resource abundance. Each villager chose to select their tastes andpriorities from various sources, ie political parties, women’s associations, cul-tural societies, coffee-shops, machinery-ring groups, agricultural co-operatives,community councils, farmers’ unions and landless’ associations. The commonvillagers were no longer seen as wholly determined, acting out traditional andthus non resource-based roles, but as individuals or collectivities who ‘exer-cised reason, choice and will, engaged in exchange strategies’ (emphasisadded), as Lukes points out in his discussion of ‘power and structure’ (1977:17). For the first time, villagers were found to have ‘the ability and the oppor-tunity both to act or not act’, and enjoyed ‘the capacity to bring about intendedeffects’ (Lukes, 1977: 17). Such a process was exemplified in the last of suchvillage elections in 1994, when grassroots leaders were used to control andinfluence the traditional collection of sectional interests.

The current village president was elected because of a deal, with villagersfrom the outskirts choosing to vote for him so they could have a fair chanceat, for example, having the road in their neighbourhood asphalted or build-ing a playground there. They did not vote for somebody else, because this‘other’ belonged to the dominant cliques and he was unwilling to help them,in favour of ‘others’. In the past, everything was missing, and only the richvillagers could be elected. Now, anybody can become the village president(Thanos Sgouros, owner of 3 ha in Kotsari).

In this context, brokerage also became optional.The state apparatus and itsredistributive functions were now extended and were consequently availablefor almost everybody’s citizen-friendly use or clientelist misuse. In any case,

Zografia Bika


such a uniform extension amounted to the embodiment of an active partici-patory of citizenship (achieving membership). A 67 year old merchant andowner of 80 ha in Kotsari remembers these details of his clientelistic ordeal:

The state agronomist told me ‘You are a merchant, so you are not entitledto register for this programme’. My reply was ‘What kind of merchant am Ithat prevents me from registering when I own and cultivate 80 ha?’ Hewanted a ‘kickback’. I said ‘I do not want you to forward my application’. Heanswered ‘Leave it with me and we will see’. Finally I applied for a refundof the whole amount that I had invested (1,800,000 Drs), but he told me thatthe regulations made it impossible to offer me more than 800,000 Drs. Ireplied ‘You should offer me 600,000 Drs.’ In the end, after this haggling, Igot 300,000 Drs. The procedures existed, but were not followed correctly,because we were not the right people.

This addresses how the unique workings of traditional clientelism were ini-tially transformed into reproducible commodities by juggling with stateprocedures themselves, witnessing the clientelist celebration of private pos-sessions in the use of EU public money and the links between populism andstandardisation, favouritism and bargaining, subsidisation and citizenship.Citizens’ welfare rights ironically arrived on the back of grassroots clien-telism. This was the social origin of a nation whose uncontested establish-ment was signified in the 1980s by the completed transition of these villagersfrom members of discrete local economies to a gradual integration into thenational market and institutions, first as its ‘disinherited sons’ and then as its‘pampered boys’. As Stelios Gleoudis, carpenter and owner of 12 ha inZobas, explains:

In the past we the ‘peasants’ did not know that we had rights. When we sawthat the state treated other classes in a different way, we then started todemand things as well. Why does the state nail me down, and promote youwhen you have no need for such help? Why do they have to tie me downfurther because by chance I am caught up in farming or lack qualifications?

When these long-oppressed villagers faced a more democratic situation theytended to be composed of ‘crowds of individual clients’ and ‘factions of cor-porate interests’ rather than becoming a common people who knew what theywanted in terms of proper and fair treatment. The individual villagersapproached their local party organisation as the main pathway for securingtheir children’s share in public sector employment which had previouslyserved as solely ‘a depository of surplus labour of the urban social classes’(Sotiropoulos, 1994: 351). The populist state of the 1980s shifted public atti-tudes towards an agricultural vote for parties, a veneer of consumerism andliving in comfort for all. It boosted preference for party benefits rather thanpolitical principles and increased the emerging rural constituency of agents

Against the norm


and beneficiaries by creating an ever-larger number of party middlemen andclients. Villagers became increasingly inclined to negotiate their vote with themass parties in exchange for concrete advantages, which also helped them tosustain ‘certain autonomy in regard to the farm enterprise’ in Goussios’swords (1995: 327) – this time an individualised link with the outside world.Consequently the group-oriented character of local society gave way to some-thing more democratised, post-elitist, and subject to the rules of the partymachine and grassroots clientelism.The most representative illustration of thistransition was presented in the feud that took place in Zobas between the ‘oldlandholders’ and the so-called ‘landless’ concerning the distribution of com-munity pasturage:

In 1981 the Ministry of Agriculture took the decision to distribute thecommunity land that was left aside as pasturage from the old days of landexpropriation to the ‘old landholders’. Unfortunately, a ‘fictitious’ associa-tion of landless villagers was born which pleaded to the Minister not to goahead and demanded the distribution of this community land among the‘landless’ instead of its lawful beneficiaries, the ‘old landholders’. Theysaid ‘We will blackball you, unless you stop this land distribution’, so theymade him quash the previous decision. The landless sons could claim ‘noland ownership’ status because the land they worked still belonged totheir wives, parents or sisters. The paternal land was commonly dividedunequally among the siblings, so some tried to get compensation forthe loss suffered from not getting their fair share by claiming some extraland, from the state. This story separated us (Lampros Papamixos, Zobas’scommunity secretary).

Since the accession of Greece into the EU, the villagers had been talking asindividualised clients to the state’s supposed administrators and parliamentarycandidates, who now made tours of the village coffee-shops in rural Thessaly.The new rural actors sought the clientelist connection, which no longer restedin the monopolistic hands of the village brokers as representative of fellowvillagers, but in those of the individualised clients themselves. An older villagestructure nucleated by kinship ties and unified by corporate values, whosemembers used to meet local problems collectively, therefore came to termswith this overwhelming modernising process through an individualised use ofthe newly available institutions of the state-controlled bureaucracy and partypolitics.

Grassroots clientelism as a ‘novel’ way of citizen participation

In an unbroken view of the passing political scene, a new and distinctive typeof clientelism, no longer of a collective or authoritarian nature, was seen toreplace all previous forms of anti-communist discrimination in the 1980s. The

Zografia Bika


new democratic parties invested a considerable amount of resources andcampaigning effort in the creation of a mass of strong yet unreasoning sup-porters who ended up presenting excessive demands as their own legitimaterights by virtue of their partisan loyalty. This was the situation that constitutedthe foundations of grassroots clientelism, inherently aggressive, whose maindirection was towards increasing individual villagers’ share of resources atthe national level. The emergence of aggressive clientelism depended hereon the bargaining benefits of villagers particularistic co-optation rather thanon the bargaining costs of agricultural resource extraction related to state-centralisation initiatives (Gould, 1996).

But in the 1980s there was a shift towards ‘a new bureaucratic clientelism’(Lyrintzis, 1984) whose grassroots connections were mediated through theparty machine, community council, co-operative, farmers’ union, coffee-shopand various village associations. It was as if the rapid process of democratisa-tion in collaboration with the market-led wider world had pushed villagersonto the stage without them knowing their lines properly and, therefore, theywere, in their own minds, unsure of the ways and means. They thereforebecame clients and ideological subjects of the party line. The brokering ofdeals and calling of shots never stopped, but slowly changed face. With therestoration of parliamentary democracy, the party became increasingly pow-erful at the local level, so that by the 1980s, as Damianakos points out aptly(1997: 205), ‘the local leader no longer fills an office, but the party grants himan office to be filled’. ‘Over the 1990s village assemblies, having no rules orspecified agenda, all attendees finally disperse on the grounds of constantinterruption and inability to present their views’ (Spiros Konstadinidis, privateagronomist, member of a partnership which cultivates 50 ha, owner of 15 ha).This was a world no longer dominated by traditional sanctions or authority tomake villagers agree.

Thus, grassroots clientelism became just another intermediate stage ofThessalian farmers’ ‘negotiated subordination’ to the national state apparatus.While in the old days, ‘villagers took advantage of elite politics for parochialends’ as Scott argues (1977: 223), in the golden years of the 1980s, they came touse mass party politics and stronger state institutions for their individual ends.At both these times, every villager’s duty was not based on his/her ownconvictions, but had initially been to the parochial community and afterwardsto the governing party. Party factionalism was thereby invigorated and evencohesive villages such as Zobas began to show clear signs of internal differ-entiation and clientelist division. Village institutions took on the connotationsof this trend, as for instance in the separation of the coffee-shops and localfarmers’ unions after 1980 along party lines, a phenomenon that lasted for tenyears. The state had come closer to the Thessalian rural clientele, which was, inturn, strengthened. This transformation led to the development of a form ofcitizenship that was not antithetical to clientelism, but rather transformed theclientelism so that it was compatible with citizenship. At this transitional time,both welfare benefits and clientelist connections temporarily exhibited an

Against the norm


inexhaustible availability at the local level without any need for mutual refu-tation. This historical conjuncture would not last for long, as Nasos Tatsis,owner of 5 ha and cultivator of 15 ha in Kotsari explained:

We would prefer it if the EU was in control. They should have known whathappened here with the ‘double weighing’ (i.e. fictitious production figures)before they imposed the co-responsibility levy whenever productionexceeded the guaranteed national quota limit.Their role was not only to giveus money.‘If you throw a piece of meat to the hungry mob,the most predatoryanimals are fed’. This was what happened with EU subsidies in the 1980s.

At this time, the political elite itself had already demonstrated ‘a systematicdifference in class origin’ (Pridham, 1990: 186) and marked the entrance ofpolitical outsiders, ie left-wingers, such as was the case with Kostas Tasoulaswho first became Kotsari’s village president in 1979. Democratisation thusopened the political arena for new contestants who were unwilling or unableto separate themselves from their extended clientelist basis and coffee-shoppolitics, provided that political participation was now opened up to everybody.This was in contrast to what was the case for the early Thessalian post-warvillage society without money, when the coffee-shops attracted only the fewrich patrons who could afford this sort of individual entertainment. As a76-year old owner of 12 ha in Zobas explains:‘In the past only the rich villagersused to go to the coffee-shop. All the rest were gathered in the muck’. By the1980s, coffee-shops became a place of entertainment for everybody, ie theywere used by all villagers and thus reflected no socio-economic distinctionabout the ways in which villagers participated in public life. As AntonisMakris, owner of 6 ha in Zobas, grudgingly describes the ‘politics of the coffee-shop’: ‘I mean that everybody there can now talk nonsense without thinkingabout the big picture of the outside world. All people are entitled to anopinion, but the ignorant should be left aside’.This political situation is in clearantithesis to what Tasos Matsoukas, an owner of 2.8 ha in Kotsari, colourfullypaints as a picture of the pre-dictatorship period: ‘We were afraid of thedynamic villagers. One who was “dynamic” then, could even thump you duringa counter-argument in a gathering’. To this extent, intra-village power dynam-ics had undergone a dramatic transformation.

However, there was something ambiguous about investigating this end ofvillage politics from 1996 and carefully unearthing the fact that so manypeople shared a communitarian narrowness of vision. Continuing in thismindset, many villagers declined the state’s proposal for voluntary unificationof the tiny Greek rural communities (300 inhabitants) into larger municipali-ties (minimum of 5,000 inhabitants), which became a compulsory administra-tive reality in 1997 (Law Kapodistria 2539/1997), when village’s communitylife completed a full historical circle (1912–1996). All these years, ‘it was thestate and not civil society . . . in which the social classes had articulated theirpresence and secured their reproduction’ (Spourdalakis, 1988: 244). They

Zografia Bika


would normally be unwilling to give in, yield to political persuasion and resignfrom their parochial share in state power and administration. The smaller thelocal government unit, the more accessible it seemed to be in the ‘peasantmind’s eye’. Villagers were still far away from seeing departmental wallsbetween their claims and activities, and as members of a large rural clientelecontinued to ask for ‘a master key’ to open all doors for all locales. Until thelate 1980s, this key was seen to remain within the community and in the solehands of a president x of the community council, co-operative, party, associa-tion or farmers’ union who could be directly approached to give a boost tovillagers’ pressing demands for social mobility. The integrative effects of suchgrassroots clientelism were transitionally under party control, making theirimprint on the post-dictatorial rural society, citizen participation and agrariantransformation.

Concluding remarks

In summary, the post-war Greek state apparatus was highly personalised andunable to synchronise divergent group interests in the lowland Thessaliancountryside, only being able to harness them under nationalistic rule. Duringthe Dictatorship, the state became more centralised, but paradoxically at locallevel, its indiscriminate law enforcement emerged as being largely hostile topersonalised clientelism, more proactive in dealing with all kinds of intra-village conflicts and thus less exclusive. For the first time, the state was finan-cially strong, becoming a canvas that covered all aspects of public life. Stateprotectionism, which was launched as part of the Colonels’ authoritarianpatrimony, also dominated in the 1980s but at that time under the mantle ofpopulism and democratisation. The CAP subsidies dealt with lowland Thes-salian agriculture as though it was a uniform entity, targeting supposedlyundifferentiated agents.The new populist state under the command of a social-ist government was responsible for the mediation of these EU subsidies. Thegovernment action as supra-local discourse was primarily concerned with thenon-privileged majority (Spourdalakis, 1988; Lyrintzis, 1984; 1987; Panta-zopoulos, 2001) and the ending of decades of political oppression and perse-cution, whilst it also brought freedom of speech, communication andmovement at the local level. For the first time, state discourse had made ruralconcerns its own. To this extent, the populist tendencies of both the Greekmilitary regime and of the socialist party in the 1980s transformed the rela-tionship between farmers and the state, with the result that, increasingly,individual farmers felt able to negotiate their position more directly with lessmediation by the local ‘big’ men.

In particular, this paper argues that the new populist discourse and action ofthe 1980s did not facilitate a direct passage from community to citizenship butinstead covered up class distinctions, strengthened parochial and factionalinterests, and introduced a new sort of grassroots clientelism derived from a

Against the norm


mixture of democratisation, status equality and individualised competition.Grassroots clientelism paradoxically aided the development of rural citizenshipas thestatewasstrengthened.Thisclientelism,therefore,standardisedthestate’slocal presence so that individual villagers found room to manoeuvre and evenpull strings themselves on a now level political playing field. At the same timeaspirations of social mobility fought against parochial compulsions of materialminimalism, apathy and strata dualization. Grassroots clientelism and civilparticipation were found to be even stronger in Zobas as part of the refugees’attempt to speed up their slower progress towards national integration.

As far as the implications for the literature of clientelism and its apparentcontradiction with the notion of citizenship is concerned, the evidence pre-sented suggests that the route to modernity can be positively associated with alocalised expression of particularism which promotes social inclusion andgrassroots equality in practice. However, grassroots clientelism as a novel wayof achieving active citizenship causes a ‘catch-22’ situation as long as it iscondemned to remain transitional due to the oxymoron of its empirical appli-cation, i.e. one-to-one relationships serving the purpose of ‘rights for all’. Thisassertion echoes Sayers’ theoretical argument (2000) that many causal inter-dependencies are unique rather than generalizable, enduring and replicable.In this context, the organic quality of rural citizenship remains tran-sient. However, an aspect of its practice lies here in the effective operation ofpatron-client relations as an ongoing negotiation of processes of internallydifferentiated belonging.

As Held argues (2004: 387) ‘there is only a historically contingent connec-tion between the principles underpinning citizenship and the national com-munity; as this connection weakens in a world of overlapping communities offate, the principles of citizenship must be rearticulated and re-entrenched’.Amidst this weakening connection, rural citizenship provides a transientnarrative for a population segment with territorial loyalties still at oddswith the cosmopolitan world. Such rural citizenship is grounded in indivi-dual experience and oscillates between: a resource-based view, which refersto the welfare rights of the less advantaged farming, and thus dominated,‘client-citizens’ – fighting for distributive justice and their exercise of collec-tive political power vis-à-vis the supra-local state; and a service-based view,which talks about the depoliticised duties of these voluntarily immobile‘consumer-citizens’ – contributing to the local standard rather than perfor-mance of rural-based goods through their land management work.

Such conceptualisation can also be seen as corresponding to Evans’ sche-matic presentation (1995; 1996; 1999) of the role of the state and its variations:custodial (with rule-making and policing); co-producing (with public goodsand services delivery); coherent (with incentive/subsidies provision that resultsin meritocratic promotion rather than rent-seeking) and cohesive/synergistic(with social ties that connect citizens and public officials across the public-private divide). Bureaucratically coherent states that are bound to a variety ofsocial groups create an ideal type of developmental state that is characterised

Zografia Bika


by what Evans calls ‘embedded autonomy’ and are capable of creating indus-trial transformation and avoiding ‘rental havens’. A call for corporate coher-ence combined with a dense systematic set of ties to the entrepreneurial classwas his solution to the problem of transformational success in industrialstructure (from small to big, from unprofitable to profitable and from cir-cumstantial to planned). The focus of Evans’ ideas is on what kinds of staticbureaucracy, given state institutions and organised patterns of collectivebehaviour, can be used externally to promote continuous economic growthand the scaling-up of individual social capital opportunities.

However, this paper has shown that a dense systematic set of bureaucraticties to micro-level farming agents, who are replete with partiality, favouritismand incoherence, can instead instigate a conversion in enterprise culture (fromnegative to positive, from unmerited to unfair and from detached to resistant)that not only succeeds in avoiding farming welfare crises but also constitutesa growth point for pulling off a dynamic bureaucracy accompanied by aself-contained system of rural citizenship belief. As part of such ‘embeddedpartiality’, the new rural citizens are not ‘out of court’ but, rather, engage inmaterializing organisational social capital opportunities alongside entrepre-neurial bricolage ‘by combining elements at hand for new purposes’ in theirresource-poor environments (Baker and Nelson, 2005: 329). In the lattercontext, rural citizens aggressively seek to win the methodological support(means) of state bureaucrats who are no longer the universalistic problemsetters. This argument is congruent with Green’s viewpoint (2008) about par-tiality in the uses of EU funding not being inevitably related to particularforms of political mediation and development in North-Western Greece.

Subsidies were neither drawn nor distributed ‘correctly’, but they didevoke an enterprise culture and injected added value that was seen to: super-sede the state structures of productivism that spawned them, shape the villagerepository of common knowledge, create previously unconsidered anxieties(for a rural majority making enterprising decisions for themselves) and forcechanges in the paternalistic state institution itself. Such embedded partialinteractions with the Greek state became the internal driver of institutionalchange in the sense of pushing many rural citizens, correlated temporarily byindividual client-political party dyads, to the forefront of dynamically coordi-nated bureaucracies. This was an alternative form of rural action to just keeppeasants controlled, wary of unidirectional betrayal by patron organisationsand segregated from the core decision making process. The emergence ofthis new form of rural action has also been identified by Papadopoulos andLiarikos (2007: 309) whose analysis of Greek Rural Development Policy Net-works as part of Europeanization detected their slowly satisfied need for ‘amodified set of power arrangements’ alongside a less evident transformationat the level of policy outcomes. This new rural action set (of civil powerarrangements) remains particularistic but also reveals itself to be widespreadand dynamically interrelated with the supra-local bureaucracy and no longercentred on single entrepreneurial actors. In the Greek rural space, the state’s

Against the norm


embedded coordination role emerges as being a more pervasive (thus trans-formational) form of civil modernization than coherent coordination (and itsisomorphic configuration focus). The effectiveness of the coherent state inshaping civil consciousness might turn out to be exaggerated after all.

University of East Anglia Received 6 May 2009Finally accepted 22 October 2010

Note

1 Hectare (ha): a metric unit of square mesure, equal to 100 acres (2,471 acres or 10,000 squaremetres) (abbr.: ha)

References

Baker, T. and Nelson, R.E., (2005), ‘Creating Something from Nothing: Resource Constructionthrough Entrepreneurial Bricolage’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 50: 329–366.

Banfield, E., (1958), The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, New York: Free Press.Bika, Z., (2012), ‘Entrepreneurial Sons, Patriarchy and the Colonels’ Experiment in Thessaly,

Rural Greece’, Entrepreneurship and Regional Development.Bika, Z., (2007), ‘A Survey of Academic Approaches to Agrarian Transformation in Post-War

Greece’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 34: 69–90.Boissevain, J., (1968), ‘The Place of Non-Groups in the Social Sciences’, Man, 3: 542–556.Brenner, R., (1976), ‘Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial

Europe’, Past and Present, 70: 30–74.Bromley, S., (1991), ‘The Politics of Postmodernism’, Capital and Class, 15: 129–150.Buttel, F., (2001), ‘Some Reflections on Late Twentieth Century Agrarian Political Economy’,

Sociologia Ruralis, 41: 165–181.Campbell, J.K., (1964), Honour, Family and Patronage: Study of Institutions and Moral Values in a

Greek Mountain Community, Oxford: Oxford University Press.Clogg, R., (1992), A Concise History of Greece, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Dahrendorf, R., (1974), ‘Citizenship and Beyond: The Social Dynamics of an Idea’, Social

Research, 41: 673–701.Dagger, R., (1981), ‘Metropolis, Memory, and Citizenship’, American Journal of Political Science,

25: 715–737.Damianakos, S., (1997), ‘The Ongoing Quest for a Model of Greek Agriculture’, Sociologia

Ruralis, 37: 190–208.Daoutopoulos, G.A., (1991), ‘Community Development in Greece’, Community Development

Journal, 26: 131–138.Evans, P., (1995), Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation, Princeton-NJ:

Princeton University Press.Evans, P., (1996), ‘Government Action, Social Capital and Development: Reviewing the Evidence

on Synergy’, World Development, 24: 1119–1132.Evans, P. and Rauch, J.E., (1999), ‘Bureaucracy and Growth: A Cross-National Analysis of the

Effects of “Weberian” State Structures on Economic Growth’, American Sociological Review,64: 748–765.

Glenn, E., (2000), ‘Citizenship and Inequality: Historical and Global Perspectives’, Social Prob-lems, 47: 1–20.

Zografia Bika


Gould, R.V., (1996), ‘Patron-Client Ties, State Centralization, and the Whisky Rebellion’, Ameri-can Journal of Sociology, 102: 400–429.

Goussios, D., (1995), ‘The European and local context of Greek family farming’, SociologiaRuralis, 35: 322–334.

Green, S., (2008), ‘Eating money and clogging things up: paradoxes of elite mediation in Epirus,North-western Greece’, The Sociological Review, 56 (S1): 260–282.

Held, D., (2004), ‘Democratic Accountability and Political Effectiveness from a CosmopolitanPerspective’, Government and Opposition, 39: 364–391.

Herzfeld, M., (2003), ‘Localism and the Logic of Nationalistic Folklore: Cretan Reflections’,Comparative Studies in Society and History, 45: 281–310.

Hung, Ho-fung., (2008), ‘Agricultural Revolution and Elite Reproduction in Qing China:The Transition to Capitalism Debate Revisited’, American Sociological Review, 73: 569–588.

Karampelias, G., (1989), State and Society in ‘Metapolitefsi’ (1974–1988), Athens: EXANTAS.Kasimis, C. and Papadopoulos, A., (1997), ‘Family Farming and Capitalist Development in Greek

Agriculture: A Critical Review of the Literature’, Sociologia Ruralis, 37: 209–227.Kaufman, R., (1974), ‘The Patron-Client Concept and Macro-Politics: Prospects and Problems’,

Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16: 284–308.Lazar, S., (2004), ‘Personalistic Politics, Clientelism and Citizenship: Local Elections in El Alto,

Bolivia’, Bulletin of Latin American Research, 23: 228–243.Lemarchand, R. and Legg, K., (1972), ‘Political Clientelism and Development’, Comparative

Politics, 4: 149–178.Lister, R., (1998),‘Citizen in action: citizenship and community development in a Northern Ireland

context’, Community Development Journal, 33: 226–235.Louloudis, L. and Maraveyas, N., (1997), ‘Farmers and Agricultural Policy in Greece since the

Accession to the European Union’, Sociologia Ruralis, 37: 270–286.Lukes, S., (1977), ‘Power and Structure’, Essays in Social Theory, Lukes, S. (ed.), London:

The Macmillan Press Ltd: 3–99. Cb to check page nosLyrintzis, C., (1987), ‘The power of populism: the Greek case’, European Journal of Political

Research, 15: 667–686.Lyrintzis, C., (1984), ‘Political Parties in Post-Junta Greece:A Case of ‘Bureaucratic Clientelism?’,

West European Politics, 7: 99–118.Marantzidis, N. and Mavrommatis, G., (1999), ‘Political Clientelism and Social Exclusion’,

International Sociology, 14: 443–456.Maraveyas, N., (1992), Agricultural Policy and Economic Development in Greece, Athens:

NEA SINORA-LIBANI.Marsden, T., (1992), ‘Exploring a Rural Sociology for the Fordist Transition: Incorporating Social

Relations into Economic Restructuring’, Sociologia Ruralis, 32: 209–230.Marshall, T.H. and Bottomore, T., (1950), Citizenship and Social Class, 2nd edition, London: Pluto

Press.Mattina, C., (2007), ‘Changes in Clientelism and Urban Government: A Comparative Case

Study of Naples and Marseilles’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 31:73–90.

Moore, B., Jr., (1966), Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, Harmondsworth: Penguin.Mouzelis, N., (1976), ‘Capitalism and Dictatorship in Post-war Greece’, New Left Review, 96:

57–80.Mouzelis, N., (1978), ‘Class and Clientelistic Politics: The case of Greece’, The Sociological

Review, 26: 471–497.Narotzky, S., (2007), ‘The Project in the Model: Reciprocity, Social Capital, and the Politics of

Ethnographic Realism’, Current Anthropology, 48: 403–424.Nisbet, R., (1974), ‘Citizenship: Two Traditions’, Social Research, 41: 612–637.Pantazopoulos, A., (2001), For the People and the Nation: the Time of Andreas Papandreou

1965–1989, Athens: POLIS.

Against the norm


Papadopoulos, A.G. and Liarikos, C., (2007), ‘Dissecting changing rural development policynetworks: the case of Greece’, Environment and Planning C, 25: 291–313.

Parker, G. and Ravenscroft, N., (2001), ‘Land, Rights and the Gift: The Countryside and Rights ofWay Act 2000 and the Negotiation of Citizenship’, Sociologia Ruralis, 41: 381–398.

Pollis, A., (1987), ‘The State, the Law and Human Rights in Modern Greece’, Human RightsQuarterly, 9: 587–614.

Portis, E.B., (1986), ‘Citizenship and Personal Identity’, Cambridge: Polity, 18: 457–472.Pridham, G., (1990), Securing Democracy: Political Parties and Democratic Consolidation in South-

ern Europe, London: Routledge.Roberts, B., (1995), The Making of Citizens: Cities of Peasants Revisited, London: Arnold.Sayer, A., (2001), ‘For a Critical Cultural Political Economy’, Antipode, 33: 687–708.Sayer, A., (2000), Realism and Social Science, London: Sage.Schneider, J. and Schneider, P., (2005), ‘Mafia,Antimafia, and the Plural Cultures of Sicily’, Current

Anthropology, 46: 501–520.Schneider, A. and Zuniga-Hamlin, R., (2005), ‘A Strategic Approach to Rights: Lessons from

Clientelism in Rural Peru’, Development Policy Review, 23: 567–584.Scott, J., (1977), ‘Protest and Profanation: Agrarian Revolt and the Little Tradition’, Theory and

Society, 4: 1–38.Scott, J., (1985), ‘Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance’, Haven: Yale

University Press.Soiffer, S. and Howe, G., (1982), ‘Patrons, Clients and the Articulation of Modes of Production:An

Examination of the Penetration of Capitalism into Peripheral Agriculture in NortheasternBrazil’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 9: 176–206.

Somers, M.R., (1993), ‘Citizenship and the Place of the Public Sphere: Law, Community, andPolitical Culture in the Transition to Democracy’, American Sociological Review, 58: 587–620.

Sotiropoulos, D., (1994), ‘Bureaucrats and politicians: a case study of the determinants of percep-tions of conflict and patronage in the Greek bureaucracy under PASOK rule, 1981–1989’, BritishJournal of Sociology, 45: 349–365.

Spourdalakis, M., (1988), The Rise of the Greek Socialist Party, London and New York: Routledge.Turner, B., (1990), ‘Outline of a Theory of Citizenship’, Sociology, 24: 189–217.Turner, B., (2001), ‘The erosion of citizenship’, British Journal of Sociology, 52: 189–209.Vergopoulos, K., (1978), ‘Capitalism and Peasant Productivity’, Journal of Peasant Studies, 5:

446–465.Williams, A., (1984), Southern Europe Transformed: Political and Economic Change in Greece,

Italy, Portugal and Spain, London: Harper and Row Publishers.Wolf, E., (1969), Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, New York: Harper and Row.Yannopoulos, G., (1972), ‘Workers and Peasants under the Military Dictatorship’, Greece under

Military Rule, Clogg, R. and Yannopoulos, G. (eds), London: Secker and Warburg: 109–127.

Zografia Bika


transitional clientelism

Documents