Rent

Income earned from controlling access rather than from producing. A licence, a permit, a monopoly route, a public works contract, a seat on the committee that approves the road. None of those create value on their own. They create the ability to charge for permission.

In this course the word does a specific job: it names what the winner of a patronage election actually wins. Not the right to set a direction, but the right to decide who gets permission, which is the only thing on the table when neither party has a programme.

Source: Standard political economy vocabulary rather than a Philippine term, used here in its ordinary sense. It is introduced in this lesson because the Third Republic makes it concrete, and it is given a full model with its own citations in Level 2, where the patronage loop is drawn and each arrow gets its evidence. The Philippine application follows Carl Landé and David Wurfel as carried in Julio C. Teehankee, “Electoral Politics in the Philippines,” Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2002, free PDF.

First used in: 1.6 · Two parties, one class, sixteen elections