Runaway State-Building: Patronage Politics and Democratic Development

1 The Concept and Causes of Runaway State-Building

          The Concept and Causes of Runaway State-Building The stakes in the new democracies in Eastern Europe are large, with the state, in effect, being up for grabs. Whoever comes to power is not only in a position to determine that most crucial of resources, the rules of the game, but also in a position to control the new bureaucracies and new government agencies. Given that much will now start from scratch, there are few if any legacies which will need to be accommodated. Party, inevitably, will make a difference. Peter Mair (1997, 172) This chapter lays out the theoretical framework driving the comparisons at the core of this book. It first presents the broad outlines of runaway state-building in the core case studies: Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. More detailed measures are set forth in Chapter . Before presenting a model linking party competition to patronage politics, the focus of Chapter , the current chapter briefly sets forth the major rival hypotheses for the phenomenon of runaway state-building in the countries compared here. The last section of the chapter presents a framework for analyzing the impact of patronage on the effectiveness of the state administration.   As a unit of analysis, the state is one of the more contentious and sprawling within social science. Any study of state-building runs into the problem of how widely or narrowly to define the state itself. Define it too broadly and one’s theory need incorporate a multitude of variables in order to explain something like the magnitude of expansion, for different elements of the state, such as the educational system and the military, may expand for different reasons. This problem is accentuated when there are only a few cases and including many variables wipes out analytical leverage. Define the state too narrowly and one’s causal inferences will not be generalizable. To test the hypothesis that the magnitude and character of administrative expansion is determined by the capacity of party competition to constrain patronage, I have settled on the following balance between these internal and external validity considerations: I define the state bureaucracy as the set of nonelected, publicly funded positions of administration of the central government and its branch offices. At the level of the national administration, this includes the central ministries and offices, their branch offices, the territorial administration of the central government , state inspectorates, and tax offices. This is the heart of the state, the apparatus of administration that translates government policies into practice, that oversees the collection of tax revenues, and that represents the authority of the central government in the far-flung provinces (Weber ; Skocpol ; Tilly ; Silberman ). This definition of the state also lends itself particularly well to studying the dynamics of patronage politics in countries undergoing simultaneous democratization and state-building.1 The state administration constitutes the set of positions most directly linked to the policies of the national government for their organizational character, composition, and functioning. It is here that the Communist Party’s nomenklatura system left its strongest mark on organizational culture. Since the fall of communism ended the nomenklatura system, it is now seen by both administrative officials and the public as an abuse of power to place political appointees in mid- and lower-level bureaucratic posts.2 In practice, however, there have been few formal or informal constraints on such appointments by the governing parties. The only effective constraint is a credible opposition party or parties, which voters can use to punish government parties that push patronage too far. Thus, the state administration became the spoils of national-level party competition in the postcommunist era. If one cannot establish a relationship between patronage politics and expansion in this part of the state, it is unlikely that one can establish one in other parts. It is important to be clear about what is not included in this definition of the state, and why it is not included. First, I am not (initially) looking at the local state                          -          administration.3 Local governments were established in Poland, the Czech Republic , and Slovakia in . From their inception, they were granted autonomy from the central government in the hiring of personnel and guaranteed their own resource base through fixed formulas for sharing tax revenues with the center. Therefore , examining national-level party politics cannot be expected...