Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 20th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview General Session Author(s) Kim Sass Mikkelsen Aarhus University Aarhus C Denmark Title Grabbing the means of administration political competition and party patronage in East Central European state-building File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Kim Sass Mikkelsen Abstract The scholarly debate on party patronage in East Central Europe is subject to two broad disputes. The first concerns the role of political competition. In debates on the professionalization of West European and American public administrations in the 19th and early 20th century, competition has been argued to provide incentives for party patronage. However, recent work in comparative public administration focussing on East Central Europe has argued that fierce political competition provides key incentives for the reforms needed to curb patronage. The second dispute concerns the classification of East Central European countries on the outcome factor. In other words, it concerns which countries have effectively limited the extent of patronage, and which countries’ formal institutions have been circumvented to allow continued patronage. This paper argues that both disputes can be resolved by distinguishing between two types of patronage strategies: A ‘deep strategy’ in which shallow reforms allow political reach into the administration, and a ‘top-tier strategy’ in which loopholes or omissions in otherwise effective legislation is used to politicise the higher echelons on the civil service. Not differentiating between these strategies nurtures diverging classifications of cases, since some operational measures are prone to misinterpret the top-tier strategy as absence of patronage altogether. Furthermore, disputes on the role of political competition can be resolved as competition relates to the two strategies in a predictable, though not straight forward, fashion. The paper derives a typological classification scheme, which points to how different characteristics shape the usage of patronage strategies. Whereas fierce political competition leads the East Central European politicians-cum-state-builders to carry reforms of formal institutions which render the deep strategy out of their grasp, it proves an insufficient condition for preventing use of the top-tier strategy. Even where such reforms are carried, recurrent alternations across the ‘regime-divide’ between reformed communist parties and parties based in the former anti-communist opposition provide motive for parties to exploit loopholes to pursue the top-tier strategy. The paper argues that the configurations of these aspects of political competition determine which patronage strategy is chosen – and why, in some places, none was chosen at all.
