Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey S. Kopstein:
Eviscerating
modern state institutions almost always clears a path for a different type of
political order, one built on personal loyalties and connections to the ruler.
The German sociologist Max Weber had a word for this type of regime:
patrimonialism, based on the arbitrary rule of leaders who view themselves as
traditional “fathers” of their nations and who run the state as a family
business of sorts, staffed by relatives, friends and other members of the
ruler’s “extended household.”