Runaway State-Building: Patronage Politics and Democratic Development

3 The Runaway State-Building Phenomenon: Patronage Politics and Bureaucratic Rationalization

            The Runaway State-Building Phenomenon Patronage Politics and Bureaucratic Rationalization A fundamental characteristic of the process of the transformation of the public administration [in Poland] is the systematic growth in employment . . . Surprisingly, this gigantic growth in the central administration has occurred in a period of transition to the free market—a transition which has been accompanied by a welldeveloped privatization process, a radical decrease in the public sector’s share of the economy, and official support for the ideas of subsidiarity and civil society. Equally surprisingly, successive changes of the government coalition have not affected this tendency in the least. Witold Kieżun (2000) The extensive fragmentation of local (territorial) policy has caused a substantial increase in the expenses for public administration, i.e. too large a public administration, in comparison with too small a state. Plenipotentiary for the Reform of the Public Administration, Government of Slovakia (1999, 13, emphasis added) During the campaign for Poland’s  parliamentary elections, Marian Krzaklewski , the leader of the Solidarity trade union, promised some , of his key supporters positions in the state administration if elected. Krzaklewski’s promise was surprising not for its substance but for its brazen articulation of an open secret of Poland’s new democratic politics—the prevalence of party patronage. The hall- mark of Polish patronage is incrementalism; Krzaklewski’s coalition was not powerful enough to turn out the old government’s appointees from the state administration and was content to add its coterie to the existing state administration, transferring political battles to the administration as new and old appointees vied with each other for influence. A different pattern of patronage characterized Slovakia for most of the s. The emblematic moment was Slovakia’s  elections, in which the party of Vladimír Mečiar won a sweeping victory. As the fragmented opposition looked on, Mečiar’s Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (HZDS) devoted its first day in government to a round-the-clock parliamentary session that purged the top-level state posts of its perceived political enemies and instated its own supporters. Over the course of the next year, the party extended this purge down through the lower ranks of the state administration, through the regional and district offices (Falt’an and Krivý). The Mečiar government’s restructuring of the state administration also involved expanding it—creating new regional and district offices—in order to maximize the patronage positions it could distribute (see Chapter ). These episodes highlight a fundamental problem facing democratizing countries : under what conditions may new democracies tame patronage and undertake much-needed reforms of the state? What are the costs to state capacity if they fail and patronage goes unchecked? This chapter explores how the logic of party competition shaped both the size and capacity of the Polish, Czech, and Slovak state administrations during the democratic transition. Drawing together multiple data sources, some of them previously unpublished, provides a variety of measures of the size and cumulative expansion of the state administration .1 As noted in Chapter , the state is an expansive concept and scholars have defined it in different ways: since my concern is for the influence of patronage on the administrative core of the state, the primary measure of state size will be the number of personnel in the national-level state administration—the central ministries and offices together with their territorial administration. I do, however, also include data on salaries, administrative expenditures, and government spending more generally. The second part of the chapter presents field interviews with state officials, politicians, and policy experts from  to . These interviews illustrate the difficulties of creating a professional, autonomous, meritocratic bureaucracy out of the administrative apparatus of the Leninist state. They also show, on an individual level, the presence of patronage politics in the state administration. Together with the data on state personnel, the interviews depict Polish and Slovak administrations that, following the transition to democracy, rapidly expanded in size       -         but not effectiveness. In the Czech Republic, the interviews present a picture of emergent bureaucratic autonomy and professionalization.      How much have the Polish, Czech, and Slovak state administrations expanded in the transition to democracy? How attractive are positions in the state administration as a means for parties to reward their internal constituencies? How does the growth of the state administration compare to other areas of the state? In analyzing paths of...