Patrimonialism in Political Economy -- A Graphic Analysis

Abstract

The purpose of the research is to continue to develop a methodological technique for abstracting empirical evidence from history about the validity of middle-range social science theories. The theory addressed here crosses the disciplines of economics, political science, sociology, and anthropology. It focuses upon middle-range theories about societal stability. The stability of a society is an important topic. From all the historical instances and studies on instability in societies, there is one generalization which stands out; and that is societies become unstable from the interactions of the systems in a society: economic, political, cultural, technological. In particular, patrimonialism (in the form of hiring kin or nepotism in an organization) is a universal problem in all governments, because the cultural system of a society has significant interactions with its political system. Societies are complicated social objects. A Weberian four-system model of a society can divide the complications into four sectors, and a further fourfold division of each sector creates a sixteen-unit functional model of a society. This model of a society can identify 120 kinds of connections between the sub-systems of a society as explanatory relations for understanding societal system stability or instability.