How to approach state capture in post-communist Europe. A new research agenda

ABSTRACT

Recent empirical evidence from post-communist Southeast Europe suggests that state capture is no longer limited to opportunities for rent extraction and the economic gain of businesspersons, oligarchs, tycoons, and individual politicians. Rather, it offers political parties a potent means of survival, allowing them to win the next elections and maintain political office. In this article, I look into what kind of research these developments, which have been seen across Southeast Europe, demand. I revisit the three issues that have remained understudied from the perspective of party state capture since the publication of initial research on the topic by O’Dwyer and Grzymała-Busse in the mid-2000s. These are the organization of political parties, the nature of public administration, and the measurement of state capture. I claim that party patronage has become the regional political parties’ main activity, with parties being transformed into a pool for the recruitment of future party-loyal public officials tasked to extract public funds. As a consequence, the public administration sees a radical re-politicization, the elimination of professional standards, and the large-scale abuse of public funds. These changes enable a more objective measurement of the cost of state capture.

KEYWORDS:

• Southeast Europe
• state capture
• post-communism
• party patronage

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Under post-communist Southeast Europe, I include the economies of Albania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and North Macedonia. I also give some examples from other post-communist countries.

2. Due to the lack of space I cannot enter here the discussion of the regime type and its relation to state capture. But since most Southeast European post-communist regimes are weak democracies or hybrid regimes that tolerate some level of electoral competition, state capture developed most likely as a response to electoral competition within the context of weak oversight institutions.

3. While predation involves personal enrichments of the political elites, exploitation involves the extraction of ‘state resources while building democracy, a free market and configurations of state institutions that would allow further extraction’ (Grzymała-Busse 2007, 40).

4. Previous law from 2011 explicitly banned this possibility.

5. I differentiate between party patronage and clientelism, which are sometimes used interchangeably. Party patronage is a mechanism by which political parties influence public administration by appointing party members at administrative and public sector positions (Larraburu, Panizza, and Peters 2019). Clientelism may be defined as the exchange of employment, goods and services for the votes of the electorate (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007, 2).

6. The frequent use of this fraud type was chosen by the Russian firm because they are not required to disclose such kind of information to stakeholders.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia [179076].