# Patronage **Patronage** is the distribution of public office, contracts, and benefits as rewards for political loyalty rather than merit. Where [[Nepotism]] runs through family, patronage runs through the party and the network — and it scales far further. The American [[Spoils System]] was the nineteenth-century form; the Pendleton Act of 1883 and the merit-based civil service were built to contain it. The vault tracks the contemporary attempt to unwind that containment: reclassification of career positions into at-will categories, loyalty screening of appointees, and the conversion of federal contracting into a reward channel — see [[White House Ballroom No-Bid Contract]] and [[Palantir $244M Pentagon No-Bid Directive]] for the procurement version. Patronage is the connective tissue of [[Kleptocracy]]. [[Orbán Kleptocracy]] is the mature model: state contracts, media ownership, and regulatory decisions distributed to allies, so that loyalty produces wealth and dissent produces exclusion. [[Trump Properties Patronage]] documents the domestic variant in which private venues absorb public and party spending. This is a stub — expand with the Pendleton Act, machine politics, Elrod/Branti patronage-dismissal doctrine, and the contracting channel. ## See Also - [[Corruption]] - [[Spoils System]] - [[Nepotism]] - [[Trump Properties Patronage]] - [[Orbán Kleptocracy]]