Clientelism has long been acknowledged as an intrinsic part of Near Eastern politics, but our understanding of it has suffered from a state-centric perspective that regards patron-client relations as a vestige of traditional peasant society. While more recent scholarship has sought to endow patrons and clients alike with more agency, arguing that clientelism is a rational strategy when faced with states that limit the scope of issue-based political participation, both perspectives ultimately fail to explain how clientelism can co-exist with ideological mass parties and aggressively modernizing states. Comparing Turkey and Syria, I argue that political clientelism is a mode of state-society interaction that neither state elites nor non-state individuals have the power to control. Consequently, to fully understand its implications for political participation, neither state-centric nor rational-choice frameworks suffice. Instead, patron-client interactions should be seen as re-articulating the boundary between state and society through a continuous bargaining over symbolic capital and material benefits. As such, relationships established through clientelism are prior both to policy formulation and rational calculation, constituting the framework within which the scope of participation and mobilization is defined. Employing a historical institutionalist perspective, I trace the emergence of this mechanism back to the Tanzimat, the formational period for what would later become Syrian and Turkish state elites. Bound by parallel career trajectories and a common ethos of state loyalty, a loose network of Arab and Turkish officers and bureaucrats came to monopolize the Ottoman state’s symbolic capital, but did so at the cost of consolidating access points to state resources for wider groups of society. While this elite’s dramatic shift from a shared Ottomanism to Turkish and Arab nationalism after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire has been the subject of several studies, the long-term state building efforts that followed would not have been possible without the continuous cooperation of dispersed patrons with privileged access to symbolic and material state resources. By combining recent work on Ottoman state-society relations with evidence from anthropologists observing state-led mobilization efforts during the twentieth century, I seek to understand the broader institutional basis of Near Eastern state-society relations in the twentieth century.