‘Jobs for the Boys’? Patterns of Party Patronage in Post-Communist Europe

Abstract

This article examines the patterns of party patronage in post-communist Europe and provides an explanation for the varying practices observed by stressing the institutional legacies of the past. Drawing on the distinction between different types of communist regimes, it formulates three hypotheses concerning the extent, underlying motivations and intra-party control of patronage which guide the empirical analysis. It then clarifies the key concepts and discusses the methodology and data used in the article. Further, the three hypotheses are probed with data collected in a large expert survey in Bulgaria, Hungary and the Czech Republic. In accordance with the hypotheses, these three countries are found to differ in the pervasiveness of patronage within the state institutions, in the reasons why party politicians engage in patronage practices and, to a lesser degree, in the intra-party mechanisms of controlling and distributing patronage. It is argued that this variation can be, at least partially, attributed to the nature of the communist regimes in the countries under study.

Notes

1. We are grateful to Jan-Hinrik Meyer-Sahling and Krisztina Jáger for making the data on Hungary available to us prior to its publication.

2. Interestingly, Kitschelt and his co-authors also argue that the extent to which any of these principles of the state develops under communism is to a large extent a reflection of patterns of state formation and economic modernisation prior to the advent of communism.

3. There are numerous country-specific accounts concerning the nature and legacies of the communist regimes that will support classification of our cases. On Bulgaria, see e.g. Kitschelt et al. (1995), Ganev (2001) and Georgiev (2008). On the Czech Republic see e.g. Williams (1997) and Innes (2001); good general as well as Hungarian assessment can be found in Kornai (1992).

4. While the MSZP–SZDSZ government was replaced by a minority MSZP government in May 2008, the research reflects the practices of the coalition government.

5. The method is described in detail in Kopecký et al. (2008) and Kopecký et al. (2012).

6. The expert surveys were conducted during 2006–09. In Bulgaria and the Czech Republic, the data were collected in 2006–07 and included over 80 respondents; in Hungary, the survey was conducted in 2008 and included 40 respondents (see Meyer-Sahling and Jáger 2012).

7. The guiding idea for selecting the pool of experts was to avoid, as much as possible, respondents who were either active politicians or themselves political appointees.

8. For a more detailed discussion on the differences between patronage, clientelism and corruption see Piattoni (2001a) and Kopecký and Scherlis (2008).