1 The Origins of Patronage Politics: State Building, Centrifugalism, and Decolonization Paul D. Kenny 1 Final Draft April 2013 Forthcoming in British Journal of Political Science Abstract Patronage in the state sector is one of the main drags on the quality of democracy and broad-based development. Once instituted, it is highly resistant to reform. This paper develops a novel state- building theory of the origins and persistence of patronage politics. Where there are strong centrifugal and disintegrative pressures at the time modern states are consolidated, subnational brokers and bosses leverage their local power to force concessions from national state builders on control over the implementation of government policies. The result is extensive subnational state capture. Such decentralized patronage systems prove more resistant to reform as multiple veto players stymie the process. This theory addresses two major gaps in the existing literature. First, it provides an explanation for variation in patronage among both democratic and non-democratic polities. Second, it offers a more credible account of variation in the persistence of patronage within states over time. Comparative case studies of the former British colonies of India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) illustrate the logic of the argument. The theory is then tested against cross-national data from the British Empire more broadly. This analysis shows that extensive centrifugal pressures faced by 1 Research Fellow, Department of Political & Social Change, School of International, Political & Strategic Studies, College of Asia & the Pacific, Australian National University. I am grateful to the Fox Fellowship at Yale University for funding archival research in India in respect of the project from 2010-11. I would like to thank Nikhar Gaikwad, Koji Kagotani, Leonid Peisakhin, Juan Rebolledo, participants at a conference on power brokers and armed groups at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University in 2013, and two anonymous reviewers for the British Journal of Political Science for comments on earlier versions of this paper. Replication data for the statistical analysis is available from the CUP online repository. I can be contacted at kennypd@gmail.com .