“Ordinary, yet highly denounced practices”. Reflections on the clientelist dimension of public policies, based on the Marseilles laboratory

Many scholars who deal with clientelism in Western countries consider it to be a method of social and political regulation that is in the process of weakening. Some even believe that this decline is irreversible. This contribution, developed in the form of hypotheses, attempts to move away from the debate that would pit the thesis of decline against that of the continuity of clientelism in contemporary societies. It qualifies and supplements the various contributions with general considerations based on developments in the international scientific debate and our past research into the influence of clientelistic redistribution of resources and the logics of denouncing clientelism on city government in Marseilles. By putting the current debate on clientelism into perspective, we show that far from being reduced to isolated interpersonal exchanges, clientelistic exchange can constitute an essential modality, albeit discreet and as if hidden behind the façade of their official objectives, of certain public policies and their implementation. However, this system of local social and political regulation is now being undermined by the growing importance of the rationalisation of public policies, and by the growing importance of actors mobilised to denounce and combat clientelist practices, based on various principles such as morality and the law.