ABSTRACT
Clientelism is probably one of the most pregnant and utilizable categories in the comparative political analysis. As a method of ruling through consensus, clientelism is found in different forms of political systems at different levels of development and in a great number of countries of the world, as demonstrated by the big synthesis of theoretical discussions and results of researches carried out in all the continents written by Eisenstadt and Roniger at the beginning of the 1980s after two decades of research on studies and analysis (Eisenstadt and Roniger, 1984). In the same decades was proposed a framework of the clientelism still accepted today and applied by most political scientists. Even though it offers large possibilities of being applied to different political systems, this framework is one of the best concepts for comparative research.
