Abstract
The linkage between political parties and the state in post-communist Europe can be analysed in three different dimensions: the dependence of parties on the state, the management of parties by the state, and the parties' colonization of the state. Empirical analysis of the relationship between parties and the state in these dimensions in all contemporary electoral democracies in Eastern Europe reveals that, in general, parties in post-communist Europe are dependent on the state financially; they are extensively managed by the state; and they do not shy away from the practices of rent-seeking within the state. However, there are also some important regional variations in the predominant type of party–state linkage in the new post-communist democracies.
Political parties are conventionally thought of in societal terms. They are traditionally seen as representative agencies, giving a voice to well-established constituencies, and deriving legitimacy from their capacity to articulate their voters' interests and to aggregate their demands. This can easily be seen when we look at some initial categorization of party organizational types – cadre parties, mass parties, or catch-all parties – almost all of which derive from an analysis of the parties' linkage with the wider society. Most of the traditional party literature, especially that devoted to Western Europe, also compares parties on the basis of competing patterns of representation: workers' parties, religious parties, farmers' parties, or people's parties. As far as most of this literature is concerned, parties are seen as an outgrowth of society, defined by, and best understood in terms of, their relationship with society.
Two developments have recently led to the questioning of these conventional views. First, parties in western democracies have changed. Their links with society have eroded,Footnote1 and parties have become more dependent on the state, both for their resources and for their legitimacy. This is demonstrated by the now often-used categorizations of party organizational types – electoral-professional parties, parties as business firms, cartel parties, and modern cadre partiesFootnote2 – all of which emphasize parties' linkage with the state. Second, the third wave of democratization has drawn scholarly attention to parties in many non-western and non-European areas. There, from the very outset of democratization, political parties have been weakly anchored in society while at the same time they have strongly penetrated the state.Footnote3 Therefore, as far as most of the contemporary literature is concerned parties are best understood in terms of their relationship with the state, rather than with society.
The patterns of party development in post-communist Europe broadly conform to these trends observed elsewhere. Indeed, if there is one element of party development on which most analysts of contemporary parties in Eastern Europe will agree, it is the parties' relatively weak position within (civil) society. Given the analytical biases in the traditional literature on parties, and given that much of this literature has become a reference point for the studies of parties in post-communist Europe, the party–society link is also an area of party development that is inevitably most researched and thus best documented. The precise dimensions of the weak social roots of contemporary Eastern European parties need not concern us in great detail here. Suffice it to say that it can be seen in a variety of indicators: comparatively low levels of popular party identification, high levels of electoral volatility, low levels of party membership,Footnote4 declining voter turnout, and weak links between parties and collateral organizations.Footnote5 Even taking into account cross-country and cross-party variation, these indicators all point in the same direction.
The reasons for the weak links between parties and society are manifold and, again, need not concern us in great detail here. Suffice it to say that the relatively high levels of socio-economic development, coupled with the legacies of the forced and extensive mobilization under the communist regime, have created an individualized social structure in which citizens are less likely to identify closely with partisan symbols and party ideologies, and indeed less likely to engage in conventional forms of politics. The traditional cleavages, in the sense of existing strong social divisions, pervasive collective identities and extended organizational networks, have virtually disappeared under the communist regime. Because of these social, cultural and economic conditions, contemporary parties in the Eastern European region are engaged in what Richard Rose aptly described as ‘mobilizing demobilized voters’.Footnote6
A second trend that is often observed by students of the post-communist region is the parties' pronounced link with the state. Not surprisingly, the first to point out this feature are specialists on parties who employ the contemporary models of party organization to probe the organizational character of post-communist parties.Footnote7 For most of these scholars, the parties' strong links with the state are both a consequence and a further cause of their thin presence on the ground. It is a consequence because parties need the state for material resources in the absence of strong roots in the wider society, and it is a cause because, once in possession of state resources, parties are significantly less compelled to engage in party-building strategies based on popular mobilization and extensive organizational development.
Political parties in Eastern Europe have been perfectly positioned to exploit the state for their purposes. There are several explanations for this. The first involves the fact that most parties in the region originated, and continue to originate even at present, as elite groups within parliaments and governments (that is, the party in public office), rather than as social movements outside the establishment (that is, the party on the ground). As a result, public office is what contemporary party-builders know best, and public offices are staffed by people who live from politics rather than for politics. Second, the principal task of post-communist parties and elites has been to rebuild the institutions of the state. In that sense, parties in post-communist countries have been in a unique and strong position to define the rules of the game so as to suit their private ends. Indeed, it may be argued that parties in the new democracies of Eastern Europe have enjoyed comparatively more leverage in determining their own environment than have parties in the contemporary established democracies.
Finally, it should be noted that a similar comparative advantage also relates to another important aspect of post-communist development, namely the nature of the post-communist state itself. Despite the appearance of the communist state as omnipresent and strong, many observers point out that the state structures carried over to the post-transition period are in fact quite weak.Footnote8 The state appears weak in terms of its capacity to devise and implement policies, a feature that is often lamented by the European Union. However, the state also appears weak in terms of its ability to resist the rent-seeking behaviour by political parties. In other words, there are relatively few institutions within the post-communist state that are legitimate and strong enough to keep the partisan government in check and to limit the reach of partisanship within state structures. In this respect, again, the state structures in contemporary Eastern European states offer parties more possibilities for rent-seeking behaviour than similar structures in most contemporary West European countries.
All in all, what we observe in post-communist Europe is a potentially self-reinforcing process. Because political parties either cannot or do not wish to function as effective representative agencies, they are forced to seek their resources elsewhere. Because they originate within the state, and are endowed with the key task of reforming the state, they start to build up their role almost exclusively within state institutions. State structures in the post-communist period offer little resistance to party interference, so political parties, or elites associated with them, engage in mostly successful rent-seeking behaviour. And finally, because they can extract resources from the state, parties can afford to insulate themselves further from society.
However, this generally compelling logic suffers from at least two problems. First, it is unlikely that the self-reinforcing process of party- and state-building outlined above will produce identical outcomes across all post-communist Eastern Europe. To paraphrase Conor O'Dwyer,Footnote9 post-communist states may be predisposed to party rent-seeking behaviour, but they are not predestined to it. For example, the state apparatus in one country may be much better placed to resist party colonization than that in another state. Some observers also point to the potentially constraining effects of a certain type of elite and party competition on the rent-seeking behaviour within the state, and thus to the possibility of very different outcomes of state-building processes within the post-communist region.Footnote10 Second, it is not obvious what the relationship between political parties and the state actually involves. For example, students of parties usually write only about public party funding as a feature of this relationship. In contrast, scholars interested in questions of state-building, state capacity, and public administration reform often focus on corruption or the politicization of the state administration.Footnote11 Thus, while both groups of scholars may observe a similar trend towards party penetration of the state, their observations are often predicated on the study of very different types of linkage and on different sets of empirical indicators associated with them.
The purpose of this collection of essays is to address precisely these complexities in the general study of party–state relationships, while focusing particularly on the post-communist states. This study offers both a conceptual and an empirical comparative examination of the linkage between political parties and the state in post-communist Europe. The first section focuses on conceptual issues. It outlines three different dimensions of party–state linkage – the dependence of parties on the state, the management of parties by the state, and the parties' colonization of the state – and discusses their operationalization. The second section provides an empirical analysis of the relationship between parties and the state in all electoral democracies in Eastern Europe. It draws on various sources of data, including the country-specific studies assembled in this collection, and probes the relevance and strength of each dimension in the post-communist context. I show that, on the whole, parties in post-communist Europe are financially dependent on the state and extensively managed by the state, and do not shy away from rent-seeking within the state. I also identify some important intra-regional variations in the predominant type of party–state linkage in the new post-communist democracies.
Three dimensions of party–state linkage
As indicated above, the relationship between political parties and the state involves a number of elements, each of which could constitute a separate subject of inquiry. For the purposes of wider cross-regional analysis, here I use three dimensions of party–state linkage developed elsewhere.Footnote12 These three dimensions include (1) the extent to which parties depend on the state; (2) the extent to which parties are managed by the state; and (3) the degree to which parties themselves colonize the state. I show below that these three dimensions actually cover most analytical and empirical categories used in various studies of party–state linkage. Moreover, in contrast to most studies that focus on only one or two dimensions, this analytical framework allows for a more integrated comparative analysis, including both cross-regional and cross-national analysis. It therefore allows highlighting potentially important similarities and differences in the type of party–state linkage.
Dependence of parties on the state
The dimension referred to as ‘dependence of parties on the state’ captures the extent to which parties rely on the state for resources that facilitate, or even guarantee, their organizational survival. The public financing of political parties, perhaps the most-used indicator in the study of party–state linkage, is the key empirical indicator of this dimension here as well. Public funding for political parties is a relatively recent phenomenon: it was first introduced in Germany in 1959, and gradually spread to most West European democracies. Public funding has not entirely replaced other financial resources on which parties have traditionally relied, such as private donations or members' contributions.Footnote13 However, many argue that the introduction of state subsidies to parties underlines the progressively strong interdependence between parties and the state and thus constitutes a critical turning-point both in the practice of party financing and in party development more generally. Indeed, it was the availability of public funds for parties that prompted Katz and Mair to advance the model of the cartel party;Footnote14 it also encouraged much of the theorizing about the transformation of parties from private associations towards some form of public entities.Footnote15
The existing studies of post-communist Eastern Europe do provide a strong indication that the state has assumed a critical importance for the financing of political parties.Footnote16 This involves not only direct funding but also, apparently, provisions that grant parties free political broadcasts in the media. Indeed, given the dependence of contemporary parties on modern means of mass communication in reaching their voters, and given the financial cost of publicity in the media, free broadcasts can in practice represent a subsidy as important as direct public funding itself. This is why free media access is the second key indicator used in the following empirical analysis to tap into the parties' dependence on the state.
The first key objective of this study is to investigate empirically the extent to which public subsidies and free media access have been universalized in contemporary post-communist democracies as a means of subsidizing political parties. If the expectations concerning the widespread dependence of parties on the state across post-communist Europe hold true, we should find few contemporary democracies in the region without public funding of political parties. Many of the essays presented in this collection ask similar questions with respect to individual East European countries, and further investigate the role of other state subsidies (tax relief, subsidies in kind and so on), and the amount of money derived from state resources in proportion to other sources.
Management of parties by the state
The management of parties by the state – the second dimension of party–state linkage explored in this essay – refers to the extent of state involvement in internal party affairs. State control includes the regulation of party activities, financing, ideology and organization through public law, including the constitution. According to some observers, political parties in many contemporary liberal democracies have been progressively incorporated into the public domain, to the extent that party structures have become ‘legitimate objects of state regulation to a degree far exceeding what would normally be acceptable for private associations in a liberal society’.Footnote17 Post-communist Eastern Europe provides an interesting case in this respect. On the one hand, the over-regulated and over-bureaucratized nature of the communist one-party state could mean that post-communist elites will tend to adopt a very liberal approach to party regulation: namely, little or no regulation. On the other hand, if the preventive logic prevails among lawmakers, the parties could become subject to a host of laws and regulations on a hitherto unprecedented scale, as politicians try to avoid any abuses of power associated with the role of the communist party in the previous regime.
Which form of regulation will prevail is an empirical question, and its answer depends at least partly on what we consider to be public regulation. One of the key elements of public regulation of political parties involves the system of rules and regulations related to party financing. Indeed, in this essay I will use the existence or absence of a regulatory system of party finances as the first empirical indicator of parties' management by the state. The statutory control of party financing has obtained a strong stimulus with the introduction of public funding – so much so that any system of financial support for political parties by the state is very likely to be accompanied by a framework regulating party finances. In that sense, given the expectations concerning the widespread availability of direct public funding across post-communist democracies, we are unlikely to find many Eastern European countries without a regulatory system of party finances.
Moreover, regulations covering party finances have everywhere been part of the attempts to increase the transparency of parties' financial practices. This is especially true in the many regions where democracy has been established only recently, and where corruption has allegedly been endemic. Therefore, even when no public subsidies to parties exist, contemporary Eastern European democracies are likely to have drawn up a body of public law designed to regulate party finances, if only because it is a standard ‘democratic formula’ required by a host of international organizations and institutions that assist the process of democratization today.
In addition, public control also includes the constitutional recognition of political parties – the second empirical indicator of management of parties by the state that I shall use. Political parties have long been neglected in the constitutions of western liberal democracies. But with the restoration of democracy in Italy and Germany after the Second World War, parties' relevance for democracy became acknowledged more widely in political as well as constitutional terms. This practice has since been followed in constitutional revisions in many other polities, including many of the new democracies, to the point that pluralism, political participation and competition have come to be defined almost exclusively in terms of political parties in many contemporary democratic constitutions. As a result, the state management of political parties now often includes detailed regulation of party activities, ideology and organization through the constitution in addition to the body of law (special party laws, electoral laws or parliamentary rules). That being the case, the constitutional recognition of parties deserves special attention as a form of party–state linkage because it attests to a conception of democracy in which parties are seen as necessary and valuable institutions, and also because it can signal that the state has assumed a predominant role in the management of parties. Indeed, given the recent wave of constitution making and remaking in the region,Footnote18 it is reasonable to expect the constitutional recognition of parties in Eastern Europe to be very widespread.
Party colonization of the state
The third dimension of party–state linkage – party colonization of the state – refers to the rent-seeking behaviour of political parties within the state apparatus. It is a dimension that is most difficult to study, chiefly because data, and especially reliable cross-national data, are not readily available. If party finances, including the use of state subsidies or the parties' fund-raising activities, are often clouded in mystery, then the activities associated with rent seeking within the state are even less susceptible to systematic study. However, the problem is not only empirical. Party colonization of the state involves several related, but conceptually distinct, phenomena. Separating these different forms of rent-seeking behaviour from each other is the first step towards a more precise and reliable empirical inquiry.
The two most commonly mentioned forms of rent-seeking behaviour are patronage and clientelism. Patronage and clientelism are closely related in that both are forms of exchange relationships between patrons and clients in which state resources are traded for political support.Footnote19 These exchange relationships have existed in various forms in both traditional and modern societies, in democratic and non-democratic regimes, in various types of organizations, and on local, regional, national or even supranational levels. However, one distinction to note immediately is the one between party patronage and party clientelism on the one hand, and patronage and clientelism more generally on the other hand. In the former, the party is the ‘collective’ patron in the exchange relations; in the latter case the patron is an individual (for example, a boss, or a local chief or notable). In the context of this study, and of this collection more generally, it is therefore party patronage and party clientelism that are the chief concerns.
Party patronage involves the allocation of jobs and other important public and semi-public positions, for example in the civil service, public sector companies, advisory boards, quangos, universities, and school and research institutes. In the European context, access to patronage resources provided party leaders with the means initially to build, and subsequently to maintain, party organizations by means of distributing ‘selective incentives’ to party activists and party elites in exchange for organizational (party) loyalty.Footnote20 In this sense, party patronage is still likely to prove a valuable and effective strategy for dealing with problems of party organization and party building in many democracies today, including those in post-communist Europe. In fact, since the traditional representational links between parties and society are weak in Eastern Europe, and since party organizations often have to be built with little or no organizational and other resources available to party leaders, patronage may (when available, of course) become a key resource for anchoring the party within the political system. Patronage in this sense might compensate for underdeveloped organizational networks and the lack of party presence on the ground.
Party clientelism is a more penetrating phenomenon than party patronage. It is a form of representation based on selective release of a wide variety of public material resources – contracts, housing, subsidies, ‘pork barrel’ legislation – in order to secure electoral support, either from individuals or from selected segments of society. In that sense, clientelism is more a party–society than a party–state relationship. What is important to note, however, is that clientelism always involves patronage, for, without an ability to control appointments within the state institutions, political parties would not be in a position to distribute selective benefits. This is one reason why the two phenomena are so often treated synonymously, even though party patronage may conceivably develop and exist without clientelism.
In the context of established democracies, clientelism has arguably become unimportant as a mode of representation, for two reasons. First, the size and the scope of the state sector have been shrinking, which means that parties boast fewer resources to distribute among their potential clients. Second, because of the rising affluence of modern societies, traditional group identities and marginalized segments of population have disappeared. This has eroded constituencies needing selective material benefits in order to participate in the electoral process.Footnote21 The same argument could be applied to post-communist Europe, certainly as far as the state's distributive capacity is concerned. The cash-strapped post-communist states have contracted greatly in terms of their ability and willingness to distribute welfare benefits and other public goods. However, it is possible that in at least some of the post-communist states the demand for clientelistic benefits will continue to be significant among the marginalized poor or among some of the secluded rural communities.
Finally, there is corruption – perhaps the most frequently used term when referring to rent seeking within the state. The distinction between party patronage and party clientelism, on the one hand, and corruption, on the other hand, becomes self-evident if we use the frequent definition of corruption as the exchange of money in return for favourable public decisions.Footnote22 In the context of party politics, the common form of corruption is financial donations to party coffers in exchange for building contracts, arms contracts, or granting of licences. However, both patronage and clientelism in some sense also constitute corrupt practices. Both these forms of particularistic exchange distort the ideal form of democracy. For example, the exercise of patronage runs counter to the principles of job selection based on merit; clientelistic exchanges may be seen as a distortion of programmatic and ideological bases of political representation. So while neither of the two exchanges constitutes corruption proper, it is evident why a lot of the literature on party rent seeking often treats all three phenomena interchangeably.Footnote23
In any case, like party patronage and to a far lesser extent party clientelism, corruption of political parties is also likely to be rampant in post-communist Europe. First of all, state financing is unlikely to provide all funds necessary to run modern party organizations: it rarely does so. This means that parties will always be looking out for additional sources of money, potentially including illegal and corrupt sources, solicited from economic firms, for example. Second, although both communist and post-communist states have decidedly not suffered from a shortage of legal rules and party regulations, the enforcement of these rules and conventions is likely to be more nominal than real. In addition, as Venelin Ganev persuasively argues,Footnote24 there is no obvious mobilized social constituency capable of monitoring and thwarting rent-seeking behaviour by political elites within the state.
Empirical analysis
The empirical analysis in this section includes all current electoral democracies in Eastern Europe based on the 2004 ratings of Freedom House. Countries rated as an electoral democracy must have met certain minimum standards, including a competitive multiparty system and regularly contested fair elections based on universal adult suffrage. An ‘electoral democracy’ differs from a ‘liberal democracy’ in that the latter also implies the presence of a substantial array of civil liberties. Georgia is the only electoral democracy omitted from the empirical analysis because of the lack of data on most of the dimensions and indicators considered in this essay. summarizes the relationship between political parties and the state in the post-communist democracies in all three dimensions outlined earlier. The precise indicators used for this assessment will be discussed in more detail below.
Table 1 POLITICAL PARTIES AND THE STATE IN EASTERN EUROPE
Public funding and free media access
The first two columns of present information on the availability of direct public funding to political parties (thus not to individual candidates), and the availability of free media access to political parties. All other forms of indirect state support, such as special taxation rules, free transport or postage, are excluded. The data are taken from a comprehensive study of the Institute for Democracy and Electoral AssistanceFootnote25 on the financing of political parties and election campaigns, and complemented by three other authoritative surveys specifically focused on Eastern Europe.
The information in the first column of shows that, on the whole, both state subventions of political parties and free media access have become widespread in the new democracies of Eastern Europe. Both forms of state subvention are available in 14 out of 17 countries (16 in the case of media access); in other words, in more than 80 per cent of all post-communist democracies. Latvia, Moldova and Ukraine are exceptions in that none of these three countries provides direct funding to political parties, although all three countries grant political parties free access to the mass media. Hence, a first look at the table gives us a clear indication of considerable dependence of parties on the state across the region. As elsewhere in the world, including many regions with a recent history of democratization, some form of public funding to political parties has been almost universalized.Footnote26
The key question nevertheless is how large the share of state-provided money is in relation to the total party budgets. Large differences among countries within one region can easily exist depending on the overall make-up of the financing system. However, large differences can also exist among parties within one country depending, for example, on whether the money is granted primarily if not exclusively to the election winners (or parties represented in parliament more generally), or whether smaller extra-parliamentary parties also benefit from state subsidies.
Not surprisingly, available comparative studies indicate considerable cross-national and inter-party differences. For example, SmilovFootnote27 reports that in Bulgaria, Russia and Ukraine, public funding is symbolic in comparison to the resources parties obtain from corporate donations.Footnote28 The contribution of Oversloot and Verheul to this collection shows very clearly the discrepancy between public and private money with reference to Russia. By contrast, in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary and Estonia, the role of state money looms much larger in the overall party budgets. This has been verified by other reports: ToplakFootnote29 argues that the state is crucial for party coffers in both Slovenia and Croatia. For example, in Slovenia, funds from the state budget represent up to 74 per cent of total funds during election years and about 80 per cent in other years. Similarly, although to a lesser extent than in Slovenia and Croatia, van Biezen and KopeckyFootnote30 report that the state provides nearly 50 per cent of all party income in the Czech Republic and Hungary. Szczerbiak's contribution to this collectionFootnote31 shows that state funding of parties has also gradually become critical for most parties represented in parliament in Poland, especially after all the numerous parliamentary allowances are taken into consideration.Footnote32 Finally, as Sikk argues (also in this collection), the state in Estonia, too, provides a vital amount of money to parliamentary parties despite a slight decrease in the share of public donations in total party finances since 2003;Footnote33 This trend may even increase with the recent introduction of a ban on corporate donations.
To complicate matters further, significant differences exist among individual parties within political systems, relating most notably to the restrictiveness of state subventions. In Estonia, for example, extra-parliamentary parties are significantly disadvantaged in comparison with the parties already represented in parliament.Footnote34 But differences also relate to the organizational origin of parties and their material endowment at the start of transition: as Lewis shows, Hungarian and Polish reformed post-communist parties enjoy significant material advantages unrelated to the level of state financing in comparison with the newly emerged (for example, post-Solidarity) parties.Footnote35 Furthermore, the state appears relatively less important as the major source of party funds among parties that have had some experience in government compared with parties that have not.Footnote36 A plausible hypothesis here could be that such parties are simply most attractive to large corporate donors, because of their recent or projected (or both) participation at the centre of decision-making authority.
All in all, sweeping generalizations are difficult to make, other than that state support to political parties in the form of direct subsidies and free media access is more or less the norm in post-communist Europe. However, there appears to be a division between Central European and the Baltic states, on the one hand, and the post-Soviet Republics and some of the Balkan countries, on the other. Among the former group, now all members of the EU, the principles of almost universal state support for political parties are endorsed much more strongly than in the latter group. This indicates a more egalitarian manner of distribution of state resources among the political parties, and hence also a more inclusive type of political competition.
Indeed, the lack of meaningful state funding may be pointing to a particular type of party–state linkage prevalent in different sub-regions of post-communist Europe. In the post-Soviet space, it may be illustrative of a system in which the sizeable benefits that parties gain from the state are almost solely derived from patronage, or even from corruption. As a consequence, state benefits are distributed in a highly unequal manner among political parties. Those who win elections control the state, and those who control the state are also in command of all resources necessary to sustain and promote their political organizations. The Russian case is illustrative in this respect. As Oversloot and Verheul argue below, the parties in Russia actually play only a marginal role in extracting resources from the state as they lack the autonomy to do so. Instead, it is the political and administrative elites, using the sizeable resources of the state, that invent parties, often only for a temporary period, in order to boost electoral and legislative support for the presidential administration, or to offset the challenge of other competitors.
Party finance regulations and constitutional recognition
The third and fourth columns in deal with the management of parties by the state. Column 3 provides data on the regulations and enforcement rules related to the financing of political parties. The data are taken from the same sources as those on public funding and are based on whether there is a system of regulation for the financing of political parties. As can be seen from , the findings here are very similar to those described above in relation to the availability of public funding. A regulatory framework for the financing of political parties has been established in the large majority of post-communist democracies. Moreover, most countries that provide state support to political parties have also established a system of enforcement and regulation of party finances; only Latvia, Slovakia and Croatia appear as exceptions. However, even Slovakia now provides a certain regulatory framework; for example, it sets limits on campaign expenditures. Similarly, in Latvia parties are obliged to submit detailed annual financial declarations and face potential penalties if they fail to do so. In Croatia, finally, despite what is probably the most liberal approach to party finance regulations in the post-communist context, parties are at least obliged to declare intended expenditures and sources of income before the elections.Footnote37 Similarly to state financing, the financial regulation of political parties has been nearly universalized in the post-communist region.
The fourth column in contains information on the constitutional regulation of political parties, providing further evidence on the extent to which parties can be seen to be managed by the state. These findings are derived from a content analysis of the most recent constitutions. Constitutions contain very different types of references to political parties. Here, the constitutional recognition of political parties is acknowledged if the constitution contains one or more of the following three possible references to parties:
| 1. | The constitution defines the democratic system itself, or electoral competition, in terms of political parties. A good example is the constitution of the Czech Republic, which states that ‘[The] political system is based on free and voluntary formation of and free competition between political parties’ (Art. 5); | ||||
| 2. | One or more pivotal democratic institutions are defined in such a way that they are of necessity composed of, or could not function without, political parties. A good example here is Article 61 of the Albanian constitution, which makes clear that it is necessary to form a party (or a coalition of parties) in order to be elected to the Assembly (parliament); | ||||
| 3. | The activities of parties are regulated by the constitution, usually in order to mitigate their potential threat to democracy. A good example here is the Croatian constitution, which states that ‘political parties shall be organized according to a territorial principle. The work of any political party which by its programme of activity violently endangers the democratic constitutional order, independence, unity or territorial integrity of the Republic of Croatia shall be prohibited’ (Art. 6). | ||||
Countries were assigned a negative score if they lacked any references to political parties whatsoever, or if they included a mention of parties but only with reference to citizens' rights of expression or political association. While this contains an important democratic entitlement of citizens to exercise their political rights through parties, it cannot be seen as an indication of the management of the place and role of parties in the political system.
With over four-fifths of post-communist democracies recording a positive score on the constitutional recognition of parties, it appears that there is a close relationship between parties and the state in this respect as well. The proportion is in fact slightly higher if we consider that the data for Serbia and Montenegro, one of the three exceptions in this respect, in fact refer to the federal constitution: the constitution of the Serbian Republic does clearly recognize political parties. Therefore, only the Russian and Latvian constitutions do not mention political parties other than with respect to the citizen's entitlement to form and join them (Art. 102 of Latvian constitution), or with respect to the very general recognition of the existence of political pluralism and the multi-party system (Art. 13 of the Russian constitution). Post-communist Europe differs substantially in this respect from old established democracies where only about half of the countries with a written constitution recognize political parties constitutionally.Footnote38 This difference can most likely be accounted for by the legacy of the historical conception of political parties as private and voluntary associations in the established liberal democracies, a conception that largely disappeared after the Second World War.
It is also interesting to note the patterns in the way political parties are constitutionally recognized in the post-communist world. Although a proper discussion would require a separate and more detailed analysis, two points are worth mentioning. First, there are very few post-communist countries that do not issue some orders or instructions as to how parties should behave or organize, or both. Most post-communist constitutions unquestionably fall under what Janda calls the ‘prescription model’ of party regulation.Footnote39 The most frequent form of this prescriptive model is represented by constitutional formulas prohibiting parties from violating the constitutional order, territorial integrity or independence (for example, Croatia and Macedonia). Other formulas of this type include a ban on advocating totalitarian methods of political activity (as in Poland and Albania), or dictating that parties must be separated from the state (as in Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovakia). In all likelihood, the regularity with which such prescriptive formulas feature in the post-communist constitutions is a reaction to the previous one-party state, in which the single ruling party was instrumental in the establishment and maintenance of totalitarian rule.
Second, a significant number of post-communist constitutions appear to have elevated parties to a privileged position within the democratic system. Pluralism, political participation and competition in many of these documents have come to be defined almost exclusively in terms of party. Article 5 of the Czech constitution is mentioned above as a clear example, but many other East European countries, including Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Moldova, position parties as the key instrument of political expression and interest aggregation.Footnote40 This is somewhat paradoxical. While the prescriptive feature of post-communist constitutions towards parties is understandable, this particular feature of post-communist constitutions is far less so, especially if we take into account the strong anti-party sentiments and the general distrust towards parties among both policy-makers and the population at large. Perhaps it shows that in Eastern Europe, as elsewhere in the democratic world, parties, though disliked and despised, do remain central in ideas about representative democracy.
Patronage, clientelism and corruption
As indicated above, both party patronage and party clientelism are notoriously difficult to investigate empirically. Proxy measures, such as the spending on personnel budgets of ministries,Footnote41 or the changing size of the state administration,Footnote42 are often employed in the empirical analysis. As Meyer-Sahling argues in this collection with special reference to the size of the state administration, these proxy measures carry considerable reliability problems. Corruption is also used on occasion as a proxy for patronage and clientelism,Footnote43 despite the analytical and conceptual differences between these phenomena.Footnote44
This essay employs two measures that tap into the rent-seeking behaviour of political parties in the post-communist region. The first measure derives from a cross-nationally comparable survey data on corruption, using data from two special surveys – Global Corruption Barometer (GCB) 2004 and 2005 – of Transparency International (TI) focusing specifically on the corruption of political parties rather than on corruption tout court. The corruption as understood in the GCB surveys excludes practices of corruption unrelated to the political system, such as the business sector. Therefore, this data should give us a better idea about the role of parties as rent-seeking organizations than the widely used CPI Index of TI.
The data on the corruption of political parties in post-communist Europe are reported in the fifth column of . It reflects the score assigned to political parties (on a scale of 1 to 5) on the question to what extent they were perceived to be affected by corruption.Footnote45 The data signal that, with a mean of 4.0, political parties in the region are seen to be quite corrupt. Moreover, with the standard deviation value of 0.34, it appears that differences among the post-communist democracies are not very large. They are in fact much smaller than differences among the old established democracies on the same measure, indicating that the perception of parties as rent-seeking organizations is universally strong across the region.Footnote46 Indeed, the GCB data shows that when compared to 14 other sectors and institutions (including parliament, the judiciary, the police, the business sector, the media and so on), political parties are clearly perceived as the most corrupt of all institutions in a majority of the post-communist countries. In eight out of the 13 countries in the sample for which information is available, parties are between the second and third most corrupt institutions, while in four countries, all new EU member states, parties come first as the most corrupt institutions.
The second measure of rent-seeking concerns practices of patronage. It is based on the data from the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey (BEEPS) of the World Bank.Footnote47 The data reported in the sixth column of reflect answers from a sample of company leaders to the question, ‘What impact does patronage (defined as public officials hiring friends and relatives into official positions) have on your business?’ The figure reported is a sum of the percentages of those who classified the impact as either significant or very significant (as opposed to minor or no impact). The measure is only a proxy for party patronage, because the question as formulated in the survey asks about patronage in general, and about the impact of patronage on economic firms. However, these are the only cross-nationally available data that tap directly into the practices of patronage (that is, into the process of appointments within the state administration). It is therefore worth including in the analysis.
The data suggest that, in general, patronage does not appear to have a major impact in the post-communist countries: less than one-third of the respondents in the region (mean of 28.9 per cent) consider hiring of friends and relatives to official positions as having a significant or very significant impact. This finding stands in a stark contrast to the generally high perceptions of corruption of political parties presented above. Of course, what is measured here is the impact of patronage on companies. This is potentially very different from the impact of patronage on both political institutions and state administration, especially given the increasing withdrawal of the state from the economic sphere as a result of privatization and liberalization. Patronage can exist, but with few or no consequences for economic firms. However, the data do reveal some differences among post-communist countries. Indeed, with a standard deviation value of 11.50, it appears that differences among the post-communist democracies are rather significant in this respect, certainly more substantial than the differences among countries in the corruption of political parties. Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovenia, for example, score very low on the impact of patronage, while more than 40 per cent of respondents consider patronage to have a significant (or very significant) impact in Albania, Bulgaria and Romania.
Again, these differences may well be accounted for by the fact that the former countries are front runners in the area of economic reforms among the post-communist countries. In these countries, state involvement in the economy has been the most reduced, and the general institutional and regulatory infrastructure of a market economy has been the best developed. However, these findings also reinforce the argument concerning the different types of party–state relationship prevalent in different parts of the post-communist region presented above: the division between those countries in which the party–state relationships are predominantly based on a nearly universal and inclusive system of state party financing and regulations, on the one hand, and countries in which the state resources are primarily accrued through the means of rent-seeking within the state institutions. Although this pattern is not entirely consistent across all indicators of party–state linkage presented in this study, it appears to represent a division between the Central European and Baltic countries, on the one side, and the post-Soviet Republics and some of the Balkan countries on the other.
Drawing on the other contributions to this collection, two substantive points concerning party patronage are worth highlighting. The first point concerns the resources of party patronage: that is, the positions that are habitually subject to party appointments. Although these resources inevitably vary among countries, many contributions to this collection seem to underline the importance of semi-state institutions, including advisory committees, various regulatory bodies, expert teams, governing boards of state-owned companies and public utilities, foundations and so on, as the important loci of patronage practices. For example, Roper shows that parties control appointments to both the state-run media and the bodies overseeing broadcast media in Romania. Similarly, Rybář alludes to the importance of governing boards of large energy utilities in this respect. In other words, it appears that patronage in post-communist countries is possibly located less in the core of the civil service (the ministerial bureaucracy) than in the other layers of public administration, which are often not subject to the legislation applying to civil servants.
Part of the explanation may involve the fact that many positions located outside the core civil service, such as advisory jobs or membership of the governing boards of state and semi-state companies, are financially more lucrative than regular bureaucratic jobs. This may well be relevant to the top echelons of party political elites used to comparatively high salaries and benefits at the national level of political office. Positions so distributed are thus true rewards for services rendered within political parties. None the less, other positions within the state administration, such as jobs in the state-owned media or the media-regulating boards, are controlled by parties for purely political reasons. Patronage, in that sense, is less a reward for organizational or personal loyalty than an instrument of party politics.
However, part of the explanation must also involve the gradual impact of administrative and civil service reforms on the sources of patronage in post-communist countries. These reforms, most notably the adoption of the Civil Service Laws, have largely been driven by the EU as part of the pre-accession negotiations. As both Meyer-Sahling and Rybář show (below) with respect to Hungary and Slovakia, the adoption of new civil service legislation has not completely insulated ministerial bureaucracies from political pressures. However, the civil service laws at least specified more clearly which positions within ministerial bureaucracies are subject to political (that is, government) appointment and which are to be filled on the basis of non-political criteria. In addition to creating a set of expectations and norms governing appointments within the state, as Roper shows in his study of the Romanian case (below), the civil service legislation has thus also empowered bureaucrats to challenge their eventual dismissal in courts.
The second point also relates to the location and scope of patronage within the public administration, but this time in terms of the division between the national level and the regional and local administrative levels. Many post-communist countries have recently embarked on institutional reforms aimed at state decentralization. These reforms have led to the creation (or reform) of regional and local administrations. As was the case with the civil service legislation, these reforms have been driven by the EU and often only reluctantly implemented by the candidate countries. However, numerous cases covered in this collection, most notably Slovakia, Estonia, Romania and Poland, seem to suggest that it is precisely in these newly created tiers of administration below the national level that party patronage is rampant. In other words, while civil service legislation may have decreased the scope for patronage on the national level, especially in the core of the civil service, decentralization has offered parties numerous new opportunities to reward party members and activists with jobs on the regional and local levels. As Rybář argues, patronage opportunities at those levels are a crucial incentive to mobilizing otherwise inactive party members.
Conclusion
There is a close symbiosis between political parties and the state in contemporary Central and Eastern Europe, along all three different dimensions of party–state linkage analysed above. First, parties are more and more financially dependent on the state, as shown in the increasing relevance of public state funding of parties across the region. Indeed, there is probably no Eastern European country that has reduced the amount of public money parties have been receiving since 1989, despite the existence of states where public funding still represents only a small portion of total party income. Together with the almost universal existence of free media access, this finding suggests that the state plays, and is expected to play, a vital role in providing resources needed to launch and run a political party. Second, parties are extensively managed by the state, as seen in the increasingly common regulation of their activities through public law and the constitution. States without a system of party finance regulation are an exception in the region, even though the enforcement of these rules in practice often leaves a lot to be desired. Similarly, many post-communist constitutions have de jure elevated parties to the position of an essential institutional infrastructure of democracy, even though parties are de facto neither particularly stable, nor highly valued or desired by either the elite or the citizens. Finally, the high scores of parties on indicators of corruption and, to a lesser extent, on practices of patronage suggest that parties in the region do not shy away from rent-seeking within the state in a quest to exploit state resources to their own advantage.
These general findings are not entirely surprising given the context of party formation in Eastern Europe. As other studies show, state financing of political parties is the norm in contemporary democracies, and is especially widespread among the new democracies.Footnote48 Similarly, the high incidence of party recognition in constitutions is typical of new democracies; it reflects the contemporary conception of parties as indispensable public institutions for representative democracy. The high incidence of party rent seeking relates to a state-building process typical of new democracies in which state structures are less resistant to colonization by political parties.
However, the interesting phenomena are the differences among post-communist countries in the type of party–state linkage that exists. The empirical evidence presented above suggests a division between countries in which the party–state relationships are based on a nearly universal and relatively inclusive system of state party financing and regulations, and countries in which the state resources are primarily accrued through the means of rent-seeking within the state institutions, and in which therefore only those in positions of power command the resources necessary to sustain and expand their political organizations. Although this pattern is not entirely consistent across all indicators of party–state linkage, it appears to represent a division between Central European and Baltic countries, on the one side, and the post-Soviet Republics and some Balkan countries, on the other. This essay, and this collection, could not do much more than identify these different patterns, and point to some of the factors by which they are reproduced in some of the East European national contexts. Given that the state and the control of its resources are key instruments of power politics, a further, systematic, investigation of both the causes and consequences of these different forms of party–state linkage is certainly needed.
Acknowledgments
This essay is a revised version of a paper presented at the workshop, ‘Political Parties and the State in Post-Communist Eastern Europe’, Leiden, 4–6 November 2005. In addition to the participants of this workshop, I would like to thank Conor O'Dwyer and Gerardo Scherlis for their comments, and Yvette Peters for her valuable research assistance.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Petr Kopecký
His current research focuses on the relationship between political parties and the state in new democracies. He is the author of Parliaments in the Czech and Slovak Republics: Party Competition and Parliamentary Institutionalization (2001) and co-editor of Uncivil Society? Contentious Politics in Eastern Europe (2003).Notes
1. See, for example, Russell J. Dalton, ‘Political Support in Advanced Industrial Democracies’, in Pippa Norris (ed.), Critical Citizens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.57–77; Russell J. Dalton and Martin P. Wattenberg (eds.), Parties without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Peter Mair and Ingrid van Biezen, ‘Party Membership in Twenty European Democracies, 1980–2000’, Party Politics, Vol.7, No.1 (2001), pp.5–21; Thomas Poguntke, ‘Parties Without Firm Social Roots?: Party Organisational Linkage', in Kurt Richard Luther and Ferdinand Müller-Rommel (eds.), Political Parties in the New Europe: Political and Analytical Challenges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp.43–62.
2. See, respectively, Angelo Panebianco, Political Parties: Organisation and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Jonathan Hopkin and C. Paolucci, ‘New Parties and the Business Firm Model of Party Organization: Cases from Spain and Italy’, European Journal of Political Research, Vol.35, No.3 (1999), pp.307–39; Richard S. Katz and Peter Mair, ‘Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of the Cartel Party’, Party Politics Vol.1, No.1 (1995), pp.5–28; Ruud A. Koole, ‘The Vunerability of the Modern Cadre Party in the Netherlands’, in Richard S Katz and Peter Mair (eds.), How Parties Organize: Change and Adaption in Western Democracies (London: Sage, 1994), pp.278–303.
3. See, for example, Ingrid van Biezen, Political Parties in New Democracies: Party Organization in Southern and East–Central Europe (London: Palgrave, 2003); Larry Diamond and Richard Gunther (eds.), Political Parties and Democracy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully (eds.), Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995); Mohamed A. Salih (ed.), Political Parties in Africa (London: Pluto, 2003).
4. See, for example, Mair and van Biezen, ‘Party Membership in Twenty European Democracies’.
5. See, for example, Jack Bielasiak, ‘The Institutionalization of Electoral and Party Systems in Postcommunist States', Comparative Politics, Vol.34, No.2 (2002), pp.189–210. For an excellent review of party literature on post-communist Europe see Zsolt Enyedi, 'Party Politics in Post-Communist Transition’, in William Crotty and Richard Katz (eds.), Handbook of Political Parties (London: SAGE, 2006), pp.228–38.
6. Richard Rose, ‘Mobilizing Demobilized Voters in Post-communist Societies’, Party Politics, Vol.1, No.4 (1995), pp.549–64.
7. See, for example, van Biezen, Political Parties; Karsten Grabow, ‘The Re-emergence of the Cadre Party? Organizational Patterns of Christian and Social Democrats in Unified Germany’, Party Politics, Vol.7, No.1, pp.23–44; Aleks Szczerbiak, Poles Together: Emergence and Development of Political Parties in Post-communist Poland (Budapest: CEU Press, 2001); Seán Hanley, ‘Are the Exceptions Really the Rule? Questioning the Application of “Electoral–Professional” Type Models of Party Organisation in East Central Europe’, Perspectives on European Politics and Society, Vol.2, No.3 (2001), pp.453–79; Hans Oversloot and Ruben Verheul, ‘The Party of Power in Russian Politics’, Acta Politica, Vol.35 (Summer 2000), pp.123–45; Petr Kopecký, ‘Developing Party Organization in East–Central Europe: What Type of Party Is Likely to Emerge?’, Party Politics, Vol.1, No.4 (1995), pp.515–34;
8. See Arista Maria Cirtautas, ‘The Post-Leninist State: A Conceptual and Empirical Examination’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol.28, No.4 (1995), pp.379–92; Venelin I. Ganev, ‘The Separation of Party and State as a Logistical Problem: A Glance at the Causes of State Weakness in Postcommunism’, East European Politics and Societies, Vol.15, No.2 (2001), pp.389–420.
9. Conor O'Dwyer, ‘Runaway State Building; How Political Parties Shape States in Postcommunist Eastern Europe’, World Politics, Vol.56, No.4 (2004), pp.520–53.
10. Venelin I. Ganev, ‘Postcommunism as an Episode of State-Building: A Reversed Tillian Perspective’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Vol.38, No.4 (2005), pp.425–45; Anna Grzymala-Busse and Pauline Jones Luong, ‘Reconceptualizing the State: Lessons from Post-Communism’, Politics and Society, Vol.30, No.4 (2002), pp.529–54; O'Dwyer, ‘Runaway State Building’.
11. See, for example, Jan-Hinrik Meyer-Sahling, ‘Civil Service Reform in Post-Communist Europe: The Bumpy Road to Depoliticisation’, West European Politics, Vol.27, No.1 (2004), pp.71–103.
12. Ingrid van Biezen and Petr Kopecký, ‘The State and the Parties: Public Funding, Public Regulation and Party Patronage in Contemporary Democracies’, paper presented at the conference on Political Parties and Development, National Democratic Institute (Washington, DC, 31 August 2005).
13. See Jon Pierre, Lars Svåsand and Anders Widfeldt, ‘State Subsidies to Political Parties: Confronting Rhetoric with Reality’, West European Politics, Vol.23, No.3 (2000), pp.1–24; Ingrid van Biezen and Petr Kopecký, ‘On the Predominance of State Money: Reassessing Party Financing in the New Democracies of Southern and Eastern Europe’, Perspectives on European Politics and Societies, Vol.2, No.3 (2001), pp.401–29.
14. Katz and Mair, ‘Changing Models’.
15. Richard S. Katz, ‘The Internal Life of Parties’, in Kurt Richard Luther and Ferdinand Müller-Rommel (eds.), Political Challenges in the New Europe: Political and Analytical Challenges (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp.87–118; Ingrid van Biezen, (2004). ‘Political Parties as Public Utilities’, Party Politics, Vol.10, No.6 (2004), pp.701–22.
16. Allan Sikk, ‘Party Financing Regimes and Emergence of New Parties in Latvia and Estonia’, paper presented at the ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops (Uppsala, April 2004); Ingrid van Biezen, Political Parties in New Democracies: Party Organization in Southern and East–Central Europe; Steven D. Roper, ‘The Influence of Romanian Campaign Finance Laws on Party System Development and Corruption’, Party Politics, Vol.8, No.2 (2002), pp.175–92; Paul G. Lewis, ‘Party Funding in Post-Communist East–Central Europe’, in Peter Burnell and Alan Ware (eds.), Funding Democratization (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp.137–57.
17. Katz, ‘The Internal Life’, p.90.
18. See, for example, Jan Zielonka (ed.), Democratic Consolidation in Eastern Europe, Volume 1: Institutional Engineering (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
19. See Wolfgang C. Müller, ‘Patronage by National Governments’, in Jean Blondel and Maurizio Cotta (eds.), The Nature of Party Government: A Comparative European Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp.141–60; Simona Piattoni (ed.), Clientelism, Interests, and Democratic Representation: The European Experience in Historical and Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Luis Roninger, ‘Political Clientelism, Democracy, and Market Economy’, Comparative Politics, Vol.36, No.3 (2004), pp.353–75.
20. See Panebianco, Political Parties.
21. See, for example, Simona Piattoni, ‘Clientelism, Patronage (and Corruption) in Modern Democracies: Reflections on Current Trends and Ways of Analysing Them’, paper presented at the ECPR General Conference, Budapest, September 2005; see also Herbert Kitschelt, ‘Linkages Between Citizens and Politicians in Democratic Polities’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol.33 (2000), pp.845–79.
22. See Paul Heywood, ‘Political Corruption: Problems and Perspectives’, Political Studies, Vol.45, No.3 (1997), pp.417–35; Piattoni (ed.), Clientelism, Interests, and Democratic Representation.
23. For example, Jordan inserts ‘patronage’ into the title of his article, but the otherwise very interesting piece focuses almost solely on corruption scandals: see Jeffrey M. Jordan, ‘Patronage and Corruption in the Czech Republic’, SAIS Review, Vol.22, No.2 (2002), pp.19–52.
24. Ganev, ‘Postcommunism as an Episode’.
25. IDEA, Funding of Political Parties and Election Campaigns: Handbook Series (Stockholm: Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, 2003).
26. See van Biezen and Kopecky ‘The State and the Parties’; Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, ‘Financing Politics: A Global View’, Journal of Democracy, Vol.13, No.4 (2002), pp.69–86.
27. Daniel Smilov, ‘Comparative Party Funding and Corruption in Eastern Europe’, in Political Party and Election Campaign Financing in Southeastern Europe: Avoiding Corruption and Strengthening Financial Control (Transparency International, 2002–2003), pp.22–30.
28. See also Janis Ikstens, Daniel Smilov and Marcin Walecki, ‘Party and Campaign Funding in Eastern Europe: A Study of 18 Member Countries of the ACEEEO’, paper presented at the ACEEEO annual conference on Transparent Election Campaign Financing in the 21st Century (Brijuni, 2001).
29. Jurij Toplak, ‘Party Funding and Corruption in Balkan Countries – the Cases of Slovenia and Croatia’, in Political Party and Election Campaign, pp.43–55.
30. See van Biezen and Kopecký, ‘On the Predominance of State Money’.
31. See also Aleks Szczerbiak, ‘Cartelisation in Post-Communist Politics: State Party Funding in Post-1989 Poland’, Perspectives on European Politics and Society, Vol.2, No.3 (2001), pp.431–51.
32. See also Marcin Walecki, ‘Money and Politics in Central and Eastern Europe’, in IDEA, Funding of Political Parties and Election Campaigns, pp.71–93.
33. See also Sikk, ‘Party Financing Regimes’.
34. See Sikk in this collection, and ‘Party Financing Regimes’.
35. Lewis, ‘Party Funding’.
36. See van Biezen and Kopecký, ‘On the Predominance of State Money’; Walecki, ‘Money and Politics’.
37. See Ikstens, Smilov and Walecki, ‘Party and Campaign Funding’.
38. See van Biezen and Kopecký ‘The State and the Parties’.
39. Kenneth Janda, ‘Party Law and the Goldilocks Problem: How Much is Just Right?’, paper presented at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (Washington, DC, 31 August 2005).
40. See also Sikk in this collection.
41. Jorge P. Gordin, ‘The Political and Partisan Determinants of Patronage in Latin America 1960–1994: A Comparative Perspective’, European Journal of Political Research, Vol.41, No.4 (2002), pp.513–50.
42. Anna Grzymala-Busse, ‘Political Competition and the Politicization of the State in East Central Europe’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol.36, No.10 (2003), pp.1123–47; O'Dwyer, ‘Runaway State Building’.
43. See, for example, Philip Manow, ‘Was erklärt Politische Patronage in den Ländern Westeuropas?’, Politische Vierteljahreszeitschrift, Vol.43, No.1 (2003), pp.20–45.
44. However, Manow argues that the general Corruption Perception Index (CPI) of Transparency International, which reflects the perceptions (of business people and country analysts) of a wide variety of different types of corruption (including administrative and economic), constitutes a good proxy for party patronage. This is because the index actually taps into and measures aspects of patronage and it is likely that respondents in some of their answers had practices of party patronage in mind. In addition, Manow shows that the CPI correlates highly with various expert judgments and qualitative country rank orderings of patronage.
45. The figure for each country represents an average of scores in two consecutive years, 2004 and 2005. However, for Albania, Estonia, Latvia and Serbia and Montenegro, data were available for only one year.
46. The STD for older democracies is 0.60: see van Biezen and Kopecký ‘The State and the Parties’.
47. The data come from the 1999–2000 survey; the World Bank repeated the survey in 2002, but unfortunately the question concerning patronage and its impact was not asked in the 2002 survey.
48. See van Biezen and Petr Kopecký ‘The State and the Parties’.