State-building and patronage networks: how political parties embezzled the bureaucracy in post-war Kosovo

ABSTRACT

Why has the internationally promoted Weberian-style bureaucracy failed to replace patronage as the dominant principle of state organization in post-war Kosovo? This article explores how international actors’ rule-promotion activities and local actors’ strategies of resistance play out and interact to explain the failure. The empirical analysis focuses on rules of recruitment in the civil service system in the period 2000–2016. The analysis juxtaposes two consecutive stages of the state-building process, which are marked by different degrees and forms of international involvement: the pre-independence period, 1999–2008; and post-independence period, 2008–2016. Evidence from the case suggests that during the pre-independence period, legal inconsistencies embedded in the internationally promulgated legislation enabled local actors’ formal and informal strategies to recruit political cronies in the newly created civil service system. The transfer of authority from international administrators to elected local authorities, especially after Kosovo’s declaration of independence in 2008, did not solve the problem of legal inconsistencies, and instead, served to consolidate governing parties’ strategies of control over recruitment in the state bureaucracy. More often than not, patron–client relationships that thrive at the borderline between formality and informality of political behaviour, continued to undermine external rule transfers.

KEY WORDS:

• Post-conflict state-building
• state capture
• informality
• international intervention
• United  Nations
• European Union
• recruitment
• civil service system
• Kosovo

Notes on contributors

Katarina Tadić works as a researcher in European Policy Centre in Belgrade. Her research interests focus on public administration reform and the EU integration process.

Arolda Elbasani is a visiting scholar at the New York University and senior analyst for the Wikistrat Consulting Network. Her research interests lay at the intersection of comparative democratization, post-conflict state-building, EU foreign policy and contemporary Islam with a focus on Southeast Europe and Turkey.

Funding

Research for this article was partly funded by the Kosovo Foundation for Open Society (KFOS) within the framework of the project ‘Building knowledge of new statehood in Southeast Europe’.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Maj Grasten for providing precious feedback and detailed comments on various drafts of this article. The anonymous reviewers have further helped us to clarify the theoretical argument and the empirical findings. Last but not least, we owe special thanks to our interviewees, who were willing to share their knowledge with us, and to the many friends and contacts from Kosovo whose insights shaped our understanding of the subject and proved indispensable for this analysis.