Introduction

The consequence of the Mouvement Républicain Populaire's (MRP) abjuring of clientelism was electoral failure; the consequence of the Democrazia Cristiana's (DC) clientelism was also electoral failure. Evidently, clientelism can be a double-edged sword. The question for this chapter is why parties choose to wield it, and how. In analyzing the clientelist practices of two Western European Christian Democratic parties, Italy's DC and France's MRP, for the decade just after the end of World War II, it becomes apparent that the relative timing of bureaucratization and democratization alone – Martin Shefter's thesis (1994) – does not suffice to explain why Italy's DC opted to use clientelism while France's MRP chose not to. To account for their diverging strategies, we need to look at the situation in which these parties' leaders made their choices and at their primary goals.