Runaway State-Building: Patronage Politics and Democratic Development

Introduction

Introduction We still have not fully realized that, since , we have not simply been reforming the state, we have been building it. Aleksander Smolar (April 2004), political scientist and advisor to several post-1989 Polish governments (quoted in Kurski 2004) As democratization sweeps across new parts of the globe—from Latin America to Africa, Eastern Europe to East Asia—it is hard not to be struck by the variety and diversity of the world’s new democracies. Their political culture, path of democratic transition, previous democratic experience, and level of economic development are just a few of the differences that contribute to their conspicuous diversity. Yet a great number of these new democracies have a common feature: because of their politicization , the very state institutions meant to facilitate effective government seem just as likely to frustrate it. Nowhere is the tension between democratic politics and the development of the state more apparent than in formerly communist nations. If the fall of communism in Eastern Europe confounded the expectations of both scholars and political actors in , much of the region’s political development since the fall has proven equally surprising. Particularly unexpected is the evolution of state bureaucracies after communism. The first surprise is that severing the close links between the Communist Party and the state has not reduced bureaucratic bloat.1 On the contrary , many bureaucracies have grown dramatically ten years after revolutions that were against an overweening and monolithic state apparatus.2 For all their expansion , these states continue to underperform, and in some cases have even declined, in their capacity for governance (Ganev ). This pattern of runaway state-building —rapid expansion in the size of the state administration without appreciable gains in its effectiveness—is visible in much, though not all, of the region.3 The second big surprise is the variation in state-building outcomes. Despite similarities in terms of their recent history, political institutions, level of economic development , political culture, and geopolitical context, a small minority of these states have not expanded significantly but have achieved superior governance to that of their neighbors. The appearance of runaway state-building in much of Eastern Europe is one of the great ironies of political development after communism, but perhaps more important , it provides a close to controlled setting for exploring a phenomenon evident in a great many of the world’s new democracies. The goal of this book is to make use of the research opportunity offered by the confluence of the fall of communism , introduction of democratic politics, and re-building of the state in Eastern Europe and to analyze the relationship between government, opposition, and the state in democratic and democratizing systems. To explain the variation in state-building trajectories among postcommunist states, this book advances a more general argument about the relationship between political parties and the state in new democracies. Runaway state-building is a consequence of patronage politics in party systems whose underinstitutionalization precludes robust party competition.4 The number of personnel expands most, and the ability to build administrative capacity lags behind farthest, in those new democracies where party system development has stalled and where party competition does not provide voters the means to discipline the government. Runaway statebuilding is patronage-driven state-building, a potential problem wherever democratization occurs in the context of an unconsolidated state.5 In analyzing why runaway state-building has occurred in much of Eastern Europe , this book provides a framework for untangling the causal relationships between party competition, political patronage, and the state which have long formed a focal point of comparative politics research and theorizing (Geddes ; Shefter ; Skowronek ). As Barbara Geddes () recounts, the Brazilian state in its various democratic interludes seesawed between periods of effective policymaking and debilitating patrimonialism, depending on the robustness of party competition. The inability to control patronage politics provided some of the most serious challenges to Asia’s new democracies in the s and s, as the Philippines and Indonesia vividly illustrate (Thompson ; Montinola ; Tan ). Africa has faced endemic political corruption (Rothchild and Chazan ), and the problems stemming from such corruption are still evident after the continent’s wave of democratization in the s (Gyima-Boadi ). Anarchic party competition led to rampant patronage politics in the French Third Republic, and dominant-party politics in postfascist Italy led to chronic state bloat (Shefter ). Even U.S. history, which contributed the terms spoils system and urban machine to the literature on pa-       -         [18.190.153.51...