A very cool device for any language-related curiosity you might have is Google’s Ngram viewer. Using Google’s enormous digitized collection of books, this website shows you the relative incidence of words in their corpus over the last 200 years. This is great because the Ngram viewer reminds us how our concerns and preoccupations change over time… Read More In 1830 everybody talked about patronage politics

If one would have to pick one word to describe the nature of Southeast Asian politics, then ‘clientelism’ would be a good contender – with perhaps ‘oligarchy’ as a close runner-up. The study of political clientelism – the practice of exchanging a personalized, non-policy based access to money and state resources for electoral support –… Read More Clientelism and Political Parties