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5 Local Control: Local Parties and Local State Administrations
- Johns Hopkins University Press
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Local Control Local Parties and Local State Administrations I have to say that for the whole first term of its government, in fact for the whole post- period . . . the average local government was run by the local people, meaning that political orientations didn’t count. After all, there still weren’t political parties. To this day, a party system hasn’t been built in the countryside. Piotr Buczkowski, former Chairman of the Polish National Congress of Self-Governments (quoted in Sochacka and Krasko 1996, 100) Neither on the left, nor on the right. Campaign slogan of the party Our Capital in Warsaw’s 1994 local government election (quoted in Matalowska 1994) A battery of evidence implicates patronage politics as the driving force behind the extraordinary expansion and lackluster performance of the Polish and Slovak states. This combination of symptoms is typical not just for much of the postcommunist region, but for democratizing countries around the world where underdeveloped party competition fails to hold government parties in check. One issue that has remained at the periphery of this analysis so far is political culture: how can one be sure that the observed differences between Polish, Slovak, and Czech statebuilding are not the result of different administrative traditions rather than party competition? Herbert Kitschelt () has argued that the countries of Eastern Europe developed three different types of state during the communist period: “bureaucratic-authoritarian,” “national-accommodative,” and “patrimonial.” With its less doctrinaire Communist Party and greater cultural freedom, the Polish state was an example of the national-accommodative type. Czechoslovakia, by contrast, was a bureaucratic-authoritarian state from the time of the Soviet invasion in , which systematically ousted “nationalist” Communists and reformers from positions of political authority.1 Kitschelt uses these differing administrative cultures to explain democratization in the postcommunist era. Though he does not use them to explain postcommunist state-building, it seems a natural extension of his argument —an extension that would posit a competing explanation to the one offered here.2 A cultural explanation of this sort might argue that national administrative cultures developed differently under the Communists and that these differences determined the course of both postcommunist party-building and state-building. In short, national administrative culture would be a confounding variable. It is the task of this chapter to control for this potential confound. To do so, I use a comparison of municipal government administrations to control for differences in national administrative culture. The evidence this comparison provides suggests the limited explanatory power of national administrative traditions in these countries and rea ffirms the crucial role of party competition in shaping state-building. Without denying that national differences did exist in Eastern Europe under communism,3 unduly emphasizing them risks ignoring the universal and lasting features of the Leninist model of the state as it was imposed across Eastern Europe (Gross ; Jowitt ). Under communism, far more united these states than differentiated them: the state’s monopoly of public life, the ubiquitous nomenklatura system, the hollowing out of the ideological core of the communist officialdom and its concomitant corruption, all these features led to the two defining features of postcommunist politics that are the necessary requisites for runaway state-building, demobilized societies and delegitimized states. The somewhat greater national feelings of the Polish Communist Party compared with the Czechoslovak one do not meaningfully alter the more fundamental legacy of the Leninist state. This chapter is about who controls local state administrations, patronageseeking political parties or administrators themselves. It is also about local control in the sense that it is built around a comparison that controls for the potentially confounding variable of national administrative culture: comparing local- and nationallevel state-building within Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia shows that the incidence of runaway state-building cannot be predicted simply by national administrative culture.4 By law, local governments in each country enjoyed considerable autonomy from the national government. They were responsible for hiring local personnel, and fixed tax-sharing formulas with the central government gave them their own fiscal resources.5 Therefore, since local party systems in each coun- [18.117.251.51] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 22:22 GMT) try were predominantly of the weak-governance type, the party competition framework would predict runaway state-building at the local level in all three. Conversely, the national administrative culture hypothesis would predict the same pattern of state-building at the local level in each as obtained...