Why “prebendalism” is a great word
PREBENDALISM — [Noun] A political system in which public offices and state resources are treated as personal prebends (sources of patronage and profit) to be distributed for the benefit of officeholders and their clients. From prebendal, relating to a prebend (a stipend from a cathedral or collegiate church), from Medieval Latin praebenda ("a payment, pension, allowance"), from Latin praebēre ("to offer, furnish"), + -ism. The term in its modern political sense was coined in 1987 by political scientist Richard Joseph. Unlike patronage, a general—and sometimes legal—system of granting favors, or kleptocracy, a centralized looting by a ruling cabal, prebendalism denotes a decentralized, institutionalized predation where the state is atomized into private fiefdoms. It is the customs officer treating his post as a hereditary toll booth, the minister auctioning contracts to his cousin, and the municipal clerk seeing every permit as a negotiable asset—the quiet, bureaucratic cannibalization of a nation by its own apparatus, until citizenship becomes merely a form of clientage.