Introduction
Party patronage has usually been conceived in the literature as one of the many particularistic exchanges by which parties attract and mobilize activists and voters. As such, party patronage has been mostly associated with processes of social and political underdevelopment as well as with economically less developed regions. Consequently, students of European politics have observed it as a receding phenomenon, doomed to become irrelevant in affluent and modernized societies in which more horizontal patterns of political mobilization prevail. Recent research on this subject however suggests that patronage can be regarded as a major political phenomenon of current European party politics.Reference Piattoni1 Nonetheless, we would argue that patronage reappears on the stage of European politics less in the conventional form of a particularistic exchange between a patron and a client, and more as a critical organizational and governmental resource employed by political parties to enhance their standing as semi-states agencies of government.
In order to illustrate our main contention, this article proceeds as follows: we first define party patronage, disentangling this concept from other notions of political particularism that are often used synonymously in the literature. Second, we provide a brief overview of the literature on the past and present of patronage practices in Europe, arguing that rather than declining, patronage is still likely to be a relevant feature of contemporary party politics in Europe. Finally, we analyse the role of party patronage in the light of recent developments in several European countries, identifying three distinct patterns of patronage practices on the continent.
Disentangling concepts
We define and understand party patronage as the power of a party to appoint people to positions in public and semi-public life, considering the scope of patronage to be the range of positions so distributed. In other words, we understand party patronage in terms of appointments to positions in the state. These positions may, for example, include posts in the civil service, public sector companies and their governing boards, universities, advisory committees and commissions, quangos and other regulatory bodies.
This definition, which draws from both classic and contemporary literature on the subject,Reference Wilson2–Reference Piattoni and Piattoni4 allows for a clear distinction between patronage and a variety of other practices with which it is often intertwined, such as clientelism, pork barrel politics, and corruption. This distinction seems especially relevant since studies on political particularism have long suffered from a high degree of conceptual vagueness and ambiguity. This problem is particularly apparent and troublesome in the use of the concepts of patronage and clientelism, which more often than not are indistinctly employed as generic labels to name all kind of political particularistic exchanges.Reference Müller, Crotty and Katz5, Reference Hopkin, Crotty and Katz6 It is likewise customary that authors make use of these two concepts synonymously, as though they referred to one and the same phenomenon.
First, party clientelism refers to exchanges between a political party and individuals in which the former releases a benefit that the latter desires in order to secure their political support. These exchanges may include a wide variety of benefits, ranging from food and medicines to a pension or a low interest loan.Reference Piattoni1, Reference Kopecký7 What matters in this definition, however, is not so much the content of the exchange but the fact that the benefit must be divisible and targeted directly towards the clients in order to gain their political allegiance. Clientelism also implies an asymmetrical nature of the linkage, which takes place between actors of different status and power. Even when both sides accrue benefits and both may perceive the trade as mutually beneficial, the clientelist linkage entails an element of inequality, which is preserved and reproduced by the nature of the exchange (see, for example, Refs Reference Eisenstadt and Roninger8 and Reference Kitschelt9). Consequently, clientelism is most likely to find fertile ground in the context of widespread urban and rural poverty and inequality, rather than in the context of affluent and socially mobile societies.
Pork barrel politics is normally fuzzily subsumed as a sub-type of either clientelism or patronage. Yet, it is a distinct practice that connotes tactical allocation of government funds, usually in the form of public works projects, to favour specific constituencies.Reference Stokes, Boix and Stokes10, Reference Lancaster and Paterson11 In other words, while clientelism entails a benefit for particular individuals, pork barrel implies that a whole constituency is favoured by a public policy.Reference Stokes, Boix and Stokes10 Moreover, the element of exploitation and inequality that characterizes clientelism is absent in pork-barrel politics. That is probably the reason why these two practices are viewed differently in normative terms. It is usual that politicians who deliver goods and services on a clientelist basis try to keep it as a ‘secret matter’ between them and the clients. In contrast, politicians who manage to pass pork-barrel projects are typically eager to present them as a political asset, at least in the favoured district.
It is important to emphasize that we understand party patronage as theoretically and empirically distinct not only from clientelism and pork barrel, but also from corruption. Corruption is another concept that is often used in connection with, and even instead of, various forms of particularistic behaviour. We understand it to be the illegal use of public resources for private gains, often involving exchange of money for favourable public decisions, and hence see it as distinctly separate from patronage. Corrupt practices might include patronage appointments, in cases when these are done for the purpose of private kickbacks or in exchange for bribes, or as the means to cover up potentially harmful investigations. However, not all (and probably not most) patronage appointments are ‘corrupt’ in the sense used here. Indeed, while there may sometimes be popular opposition to the exercise of party patronage, a large number of appointments done by political parties in modern democracies are often quite overt and above board and need not be seen as corrupt or illegitimate.
Defining patronage in terms of appointments, as we do it here, helps to clarify its relation to clientelism, pork barrel, and corruption. The three latter phenomena are, per definition, far more penetrating than party patronage, reaching larger numbers of people and covering wider ranges of exchanges. The point is, however, that patronage is the necessary condition for the emergence of all of the other three particularistic exchanges, since it is mainly due to their ability to control state positions that parties are able to manipulate state resources in clientelistic or corrupt ways. In other words, insofar as a party does not control state institutions through appointments, it will hardly be in the position to develop large-scale clientelist exchanges to favour specific constituencies through the allocation of funds, or to make illegal use of public resources for private gains.Reference Kopecký7, Reference van Biezen and Kopecký12
A more important difference with which this article is concerned, and on which we develop at length in the next section, refers to the motivations and uses of these practices. While clientelism and pork barrel are essentially electoral tools in which benefits are delivered in order to obtain the recipients’ votes, party patronage may also serve organizational and governmental ends. Patronage may certainly work as an exchange for political allegiance – Lyrintzis calls this specific form of patronage bureaucratic clientelismReference Lyrintzis13 – but it may also be a means to shore up organizational networks, for example by rewarding loyal party officials with jobs or titles. Importantly, access to non-elective offices of the state can also be one of the means by which parties try to influence policy design and policy implementation. In that sense, patronage is less of a reward for services, or less of a vote-buying strategy, and more a legitimate part of party government.
Past and present of party patronage
Definitions of party patronage have frequently emphasized its transactional and vertical nature. Accordingly, the party acts as a collective patron, supplying jobs in exchange for political allegiance. Public jobs are allocated to party supporters as a reward for services rendered, or as a prepayment for services to be provided in the future. It is in this sense that patronage is seen as a particularistic exchange, a selective incentive similar to any other clientelistic practice. As such, party patronage has been mostly seen as a trait of transitional settings from traditional to modern societies. In the early stages of the process of social modernization and democratization, parties found themselves in the position of brokers between large and vulnerable sectors of society (typically urban migrants) and the state bureaucracy.Reference Weingrod14 Consequently, this kind of patronage practice is generally considered to be severely undermined by social and political modernization. For example, growing economic wealth gives rise to more autonomous citizens, whose political choices are less dependent on the patrons’ favours. Likewise, higher levels of education and political awareness increase the electoral costs to parties that capture and make use of public resources as direct selective benefits for their followers.Reference Lemarchand and Legg15
On the basis of such arguments, Frank Sorauf announced in 1959 the inexorable decline of patronage in the United States.Reference Sorauf16 American local political machines had been, for decades, sustained by the ability of local bosses to distribute state jobs to their following. Public posts had been a mechanism of vote-maximization and the compensation par excellence for party activists in American local politics.Reference Banfield and Wilson17, Reference Scott18 Economic prosperity, full-employment, and the expansion of education thus eventually reduced the value of patronage as job security, and turned public attitudes hostile towards patronage practices. At the same time, radio and television reduced the need for large political machines as the means of communication with the voters.
In most of Europe, the development of mass parties brought about class politics and cleavage structuring on a different scale (and earlier) than in the US. It is therefore not surprising that patronage politics on the old continent was quickly recognised as a distinct feature of the early days of liberal democracy in the late 19th century, and not of the mass politics of the 20th century.Reference Ware19 By definition, mass parties implied a universalistic conception of politics, based on programmatic appeals structured along cleavages of ideology, religion, or class.Reference Neumann and Neumann20, Reference Katz and Mair21 This is not to say that patronage practices did not survive the advent of the mass party. On the contrary, as Shefter and others have shown,Reference Shefter22–24 mass parties have also been known to adapt these practices as a means of ensuring their own electoral survival. However, in Europe at least, these practices became more difficult to sustain in the era of the mass party, and hence also became seen as more exceptional than conventional.
In sum, both in the US and in Europe, the decline in patron–client political relations was seen as an inevitable consequence of the processes of modernization. Capitalist development and its by-products, urbanization, factory production, and new forms of communication and transportation, paved the way for new, more horizontal, patterns of interest aggregation and articulation. Collective organizations – mass parties being the main example – replaced traditional bonds of representation. Modernization would have turned patronage obsolete.Reference Theobald25 The study of patronage was thus confined to developing areas of the world, and in the European context, to those countries, like Italy and Greece, which had supposedly not achieved the same degree of modernization of their more developed neighbours. Table 1
Party patronage in contemporary Europe
Nevertheless, patronage politics proved to be more resilient and adaptable than expected by the developmental approach. There is no doubt in our view that the clientelistic style of patronage politics has diminished in importance as a mechanism of linkage between parties and society in most of Europe. But there are equally good reasons and compelling evidence showing that patronage continues to perform a crucial role in contemporary European party politics. The point is that rather than as a reward aimed to establishing loyal clienteles (which as we shall see do persist), contemporary parties are more likely to resort to patronage as an organizational and governmental resource. More specifically, the ability of parties to appoint into the state has become a key means of strengthening parties’ organizations as semi-state agencies, entrenching their networks in the public sphere and ensuring party control over the policy-making process.26
The shift in the use and rationale of party patronage must be regarded and understood in the light of the major transformations of European party organizations in the last three decades. This transformation consists of a gradual but consistent move from the realm of civil society to the sphere of the state. This process has been fully analysed and well-documented elsewhere and it does not need to be detailed here.Reference van Biezen and Kopecký12, Reference Katz and Mair21, Reference Kopecký, Mair and Salih27, Reference van Biezen28 A few points are however worth repeating in order to assess the key factors that have fundamentally affected the practice of party patronage.
Scholars agree in pointing out the substantial erosion of the linkages between parties and society.Reference Dalton and Wattenberg29 Structural social changes characterized by the weakening of stable collective political identities and a secular process of individualization led parties to lose ground as channels of interest aggregation and vehicles of social integration. Subsequently, parties’ role as providers of symbolic identities and agents of collective representation has overall been undermined. Increasing electoral volatility, consistent decline in party membership, and waning of party identification are but the most visible aspects of a process that has transformed the standing and functions of parties in the political system. In turn, while breaking their stable ties with society, parties turned to the state in order to secure their survival, both in terms of legitimacy and resources. Where mass parties were essentially sustained by their linkages with society, current party organizations obtain the bulk of resources from state funds, and legitimize their existence as semi-state agencies of government.Reference van Biezen28
In terms of party recruitment, this shift towards the state could imply that as long as parties are to attract members, they are likely to have a greater need of patronage than when they were organizations of mass integration.30 However, even what parties pursue in terms of membership has probably changed dramatically over the last decades. Contemporary party organizations have become the parties of public office.Reference Katz and Mair21 Current major party organizations appear to be dominated by the group who holds public office, whether we call them cartels, new-cadres, or professional-electoral. The ‘professionals camouflaged’ as described by Panebianco,Reference Panebianco31 i.e. party members who are formally appointed to a low qualified state job to serve as a full-time activist in the neighbourhood or the factory, are far less important to the contemporary party than a network of professionals, which may effectively enhance the party’s control over state agencies. In other words, if parties do need patronage to sustain the organization, party leaderships no longer want their organizations to be necessarily mass-based and activist, but rather professionally qualified and loyal to the political project of the party in public office.
Indeed, what recent organizational transformations among the European political parties suggest is that parties are likely to tighten their reach and control within the state and semi-state sector via political appointments. Unable or unwilling to appeal to large and consistent groups of society as representatives of their values and beliefs, parties tend to present themselves to the voters as successful governors and competent office-holders.Reference Kopecký, Mair and Salih27 It is therefore not surprising that the ability to appoint networks of professionals, who combine loyalty to the party with professional expertise, becomes a major asset of any party organization. In fact, patronage becomes a key device by which parties persist as semi-state managerial agencies.
This all of course entails a notion of patronage quite different from the one centred on the compensation for the poor and unskilled, who put up posters and distribute leaflets for the party. As Kopecký and Mair argue, the currently dominant kind of patronage not only looks different, but it also serves a different purpose.Reference Kopecký, Mair and Salih27 Rather than an exchange for political support, patronage becomes a mode of governing, one of the sinews of party government. In the next section, we explore the contemporary literature on party patronage in order to assess how far these developments have reached in the context of current European party politics.
Patronage in current European party politics
Empirical study of patronage presents significant research difficulties. Most governments are reluctant to admit patronage practices due to the negative connotation the notion of partitocracy has in public opinion. Likewise, the issue is, to a large extent, part of the black box of internal party politics, which keeps it apart from public scrutiny.Reference Müller, Blondel and Cotta32 In addition, the aforementioned prevalence of a notion of patronage as a method of vote maximization or as a means to build loyal clienteles led students of Western European politics to neglect it as an obsolete and superseded practice. Nonetheless, the shift in party–states relations along with the emergence of a significant number of new democracies (and thereby of new or reborn parties) has recently brought the subject to the fore. In most cases, however, studies on party patronage rely on proxy measures that do not capture the rationale of political appointments.Reference O’Dwyer33, Reference Grzymala-Busse34 While we wait for more in depth studies on this subject to be carried out, in what follows we draw on the available research on the practices of party patronage in different European countries and present a classification, obviously somewhat discretional, which will enable us to appreciate some of the differences between the countries in the region. As Table 1 shows, the classification divides countries into four distinct groups, according to both the scope of party appointments within the state and semi-state sector (narrow, broad), as well as different rationales that lie behind their practices of party patronage (patronage as a form of control or a mode of governing, and patronage as a form of reward). We leave category IV, for which no convincing European empirical examples could be found, out of our further considerations.
Narrow scope of patronage, patronage as a mode of governing
Our first group includes those countries in which parties have few opportunities to appoint beyond the very top positions in government, and where patronage appointments are primarily geared towards sustaining party government. These are countries in which strong bureaucratic traditions and long-standing professionalized bureaucratic bodies largely prevent parties from reaching any further into the state administration than to the ministerial positions. The very few legally sanctioned appointments are aimed to secure the mere existence of party government; that is, to make it possible for parties to implement their main policies by controlling the highest echelons of the state. Tight constraints over appointments do not let any, or only small, room for patronage as a means of enhancing party’s organizational structure. This model seemingly applies to Scandinavian countries35–Reference Strøm37 and by and large to the UK. Along with autonomous bureaucracies, Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish parties have been institutionalized enough so as to maintain their organizations strong even when they stay out of government and, in fact, most of these parties seem to keep a relatively pronounced policy-seeking orientation. The generous state funding also sustains these parties when they are in opposition. Finally, a powerful legislature, which allows the voice of the opposition to be heard, also contributes to keep parties out of government robust.Reference Christensen36
In the last few years a series of reforms seems to have put the UK back into this category, despite the relatively modest state funding of parties. British Conservative governments after 1979 had pursued an appointments’ policy that introduced much greater politicization than had been practised earlier in the history of the country. These appointments fitted the pattern described in the previous sections: in Ware’s terms, they ‘were not designed to create a new patronage system, so much as to ensure that “one of us” was involved in the implementation of policy. In other words, the appointment policies were pursued to ensure that the intentions of government policy were carried through’.Reference Ware19 Yet mostly as a response to public demands, the Labour government initiated, in 1997, a process of incremental reforms by which appointment powers were taken away from ministers and delegated to independent appointment commissions.38 Arguably, this has somewhat decreased the number of appointments at the discretion of political parties, despite the headlines made by alleged cases of Labour party patronage, such as the cash for honours affair in 2006 and 2007, involving nominations for life peerages for party donations. This is why we place the UK in the first rather than the third category of countries, even though it is probably a border-line case between the two. In all these countries, therefore, political parties take major political decisions while they rely on overall neutral and efficient bureaucracies for its implementation.Reference Page, Wright, Page and Wright39
Broad scope of patronage, patronage as a reward
At the opposite extreme we find those polities where, in addition to the control of top rank positions within the state bureaucracy, a large number of jobs are supplied as a clientelistic exchange for political support. These are countries of bureaucratic clientelism. In these countries, parties colonize public bureaucracies and inflate state agencies with partisans in order to enhance their standing in the community. Given that the distribution of jobs in the public administration hardly secures any fundamental advantage in mass democracies,Reference Piattoni1, Reference Hopkin, Crotty and Katz6 this type of patronage is primarily employed in the internal struggle among competing factions of the ruling party, or as the stepping stone for other, more far-reaching clientelistic exchanges, or often for both purposes. What matters, however, is that jobs are primarily utilized as a reward for party or factional allegiance, rather than for any other purposes.
This type of patronage has long been recognized as a feature of Southern European political systems. The distribution of jobs among factions of the main Italian parties, the DCI and PSI, has been extensively documented by the literature;Reference Pasquino40, Reference Leonardi and Wertman41 more recent studies have also shown the massive use of such patronage by the Socialists in Spain in the wake of their electoral victory in 1982.Reference Gillespie, Bell and Shaw42, Reference Hopkin43 Spain and Italy, however, seem to have initiated deep processes of bureaucratic reform, limiting such forms of patronage, while their political parties, especially in Spain, have turned out to be less concerned about the distribution of jobs as an electoral strategy.Reference Cotta and Verzichelli44, Reference Papadopoulos45 By contrast, recent research shows that Greek and Portuguese parties take advantage of their position within the state in order to develop and contain electoral clienteles through the allocation of public jobs.46, 47
Indeed, the case of PASOK, the Greek Socialist Party, has attracted a great deal of attention as an atypical case of a Social-Democrat patronage-based mass party.Reference Sotiropoulos23, 46 Interestingly, the current incumbent centre-right New Democracy, has followed a similar pattern in the use of state jobs as bureaucratic clientelism.Reference Lyrintzis13, 46 All in all, the widespread use of patronage as a resource for the building of party electoral machines has long been a characteristic of Greek politics; it gained the country the label of Patronage Democracy.Reference Mavrogordatos48 Similarly, the use of jobs as an exchange for party loyalty has remained a permanent characteristic of the two major Portuguese parties (PSD and PS) since the restoration of democracy.47
In Greece as well as in Portugal, the inauguration of a democratic regime in the lack of a consolidated independent bureaucracy left state structures at the disposal of party politicians, who used them in order to build their party organizations, capture electoral clienteles, and cement the position of the party within their societies. As Shefter suggests, and as the Scandinavian countries and the UK also confirm in the opposite sense, whenever mass politics emerges prior to the establishment of an independent state bureaucracy, parties have the greater chance to resort to patronage as a viable strategy for political mobilization.Reference Shefter22
In that same vein, the simultaneous process of party building and state building, as has been taking place in new democracies in Central and Eastern Europe, was pointed out as creating ideal conditions for patronage politics.Reference O’Dwyer33 Not only did the parties there have the chance to take advantage of relatively weak and non-professionalized bureaucracies, but a sweeping replacement of state employees was also legitimized by the nature of the regime change. As O’Dwyer notes, the anti-communist coalitions in the early 1990s considered their first task to be replacing ‘red’ officials wherever possible.Reference O’Dwyer33 In addition, most parties in post-communist countries either originated within the state or gained rapid access to it, which gave them the chance to compensate their feeble position in society by a strong grip over the public sector, in a vein similar to Portugal and Spain in the 1970s.
In this context, the case of Ukraine stands out through the rise of patronage-based machine politics.Reference D’Anieri49, Reference Birch50 In many other post-communist democracies, similar patterns of jobs as exchanges for party allegiance have been detected. In Poland, for example, as many as 90,000 jobs are estimated as being objects of party patronage, a large share of which are used by parties as a reward for party loyalty.51, Reference Szczerbiak52 In Bulgaria, every government turnover has provided new incumbents with the chance to distribute jobs as political payment.53 In these two countries, EU-sponsored projects and policy recommendations that have been part of EU accession negotiations have so far failed in professionalizing the public sector and every new government finds it normal to sweep previously appointed employees off the state. In those countries, filling state structures with partisans has become a well-entrenched informal institution which is difficult to reverse, regardless of the existence of formal rules that might suggest otherwise.
Broad scope of patronage, patronage as a mode of governing
In between these two types of countries we find an array of European polities in which the prevailing pattern of political appointments seems to fit best the developments outlined in the theoretical part of this paper: most appointments are essentially aimed at controlling state agencies for the implementation of party policies and to strengthen parties’ networks in government. Parties attempt to fill the top ranks of the state with their networks of loyal experts in order to shore up themselves as efficient agencies of government. In terms of motivations for patronage, there is not much of a difference with the first category of countries. However, this does not say much about the number of positions filled by the party. Indeed, this category encompasses countries that substantially differ in this respect. It is arguable, however, that most of these cases exhibit somewhat fewer political appointments than the countries of bureaucratic clientelism, and probably more than either the Scandinavian countries or the UK. In other words, in terms of the number of positions filled, these countries can best be considered as medium to high level cases.
The Netherlands is the country of this category with probably least political appointments. Some accounts suggest that the Netherlands should be included in our first category, claiming that ‘patronage by the national government does not exist or is highly exceptional’.Reference Müller, Blondel and Cotta32 However, other studies reveal that political parties do appoint at the top level and in semi state offices and that political affiliation ‘plays at least a part in the selection of senior civil servants’.Reference Van der Meer, Raadschelders, Page and Wright54 The high level of partisans at the high level of the bureaucracy suggests that parties succeed in either introducing or attracting networks of civil servants, which at the same time reinforces their grip over the process of policy implementation and their own strength as agencies of government.
The goal of political control over the process of implementation of policies is much clearer in Iceland, France, and Germany. Unlike their Scandinavian neighbours, Icelandic parties keep a relatively large leeway to appoint top rank officials, and the distribution of jobs as a reward at lower levels is still somewhat important for the electoral performance of Icelandic politicians in party primaries. Nonetheless, the most visible motivation of party patronage in Iceland seems to be the guarantee that a trusted individual is placed in a politically sensitive post.24 Political control is also the dominant pattern in Germany, where the highest echelons of the central bureaucracy, the judiciary, radio and TV corporations, and quangos are permeated by partisan appointees.Reference Müller, Blondel and Cotta32 Studies of German public administration confirm that political parties have, during the last decades, gained in importance in policy-making, something they do mainly by appointing party officials to key top positions, reaching up to heads of divisions in the central bureaucracy.Reference Goetz, Page and Wright55 In France, patronage is also intended to ensure that policy congenial to the minister and the government is proposed, prepared and in due course implemented: experts estimate that between 500 and 1000 positions are at the discretion of the French government (including the president and the cabinet), all of them at the top level.Reference Müller, Blondel and Cotta32, Reference Morel, Gallagher and Uleri56 As in Germany, French semi-public agencies are more permeated than the central bureaucracy, which enjoys strong traditions of autonomy and professionalism in both countries.Reference Goetz, Page and Wright55, Reference Rouban, Page and Wright57
Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Latvia, all present higher degrees of civil service politicization than either France or Germany, with parties appointing more, and reaching not only the upper but sometimes also the non-managing ranks of the civil service. Yet, large numbers of political appointments in these countries might, in practice, be a necessary condition for similar patronage goals as in France or Germany. Indeed, relatively large-scale replacements of public employees following a change of government, which are often seen by Western eyes as doubtless cases of bureaucratic clientelism, are primarily motivated by control of the policy design and implementation. Party appointments in Hungary, Latvia and the Czech Republic have gradually been less about membership recruitment and reward than about the presence of loyal experts within the state institutions.Reference Meyer-Sahling58–Reference Kopecký, Webb and White60 It is worth pointing out in this context that while a Danish politician can trust senior civil servants to carry out the political decisions taken by the government, to secure the same for a minister in Hungary or Czech Republic might require the replacement of little less than the whole top level of ministerial staff. Polarized political contestation in those countries takes place in the context of feeble bureaucracies. This has put in motion a cycle by which every new official does not trust the personnel hired by their predecessor. Appointing their own people is thereby (perceived to be) the only way to ensure that their decisions will not be sabotaged.
Belgium and Austria close our list. In both these countries, posts in the federal bureaucracy used to be allocated according to the parties’ strengths in Parliament (in Austria the practice was institutionalized as the Proporz system); these posts constituted part of the process of negotiations for the government coalition. In both these countries, the allocation of public jobs also used to be important for parties to cement their presence in their respective segments of society, so much so that, 30 years ago, these cases would have undoubtedly fallen under the bureaucratic clientelistic type. However, and considering that politicization of the Belgium and Austrian states remains comparatively high, in these cases we also find that party cohesion and, above all, the control of policy-making and implementation, have become, in the last few decades, the key rationale of party patronage.Reference Müller, Pelinka and Plasser61–64
Conclusion
Party patronage, understood as the ability of parties to appoint in public and semi-public institutions, is as relevant a feature of European politics as it was decades ago. We contend, on the basis of our review, that patronage as a form of reward exists and is likely to persist in the future as long as parties are to maintain, at least thin, active rank and files. Patronage of high positions as a reward will also continue to exist as a numerically marginal but publicly highly contested practice, providing status or golden retirements for politicians and for important party backers. Indeed, ambassadorial positions seem to be the worldwide chosen reward of this kind. However, we also contend that this sort of patronage weighs much less and is overall less meaningful than it used to be in the context of contemporary European party politics. The persistence of high levels of patronage as a reward in Greece, Portugal and, to a lesser extent, in Italy, Spain and a number of post-Communist democracies could be seen as contradicting the argument. Nonetheless, even in those countries, patronage is increasingly less aimed to establish large mass-clienteles as it is the means to entrench parties within the state. Importantly, also in those countries popular opposition to partitocratic practices limits the scope of vote mobilization via patronage. In other words, what we suggest here is that this category of countries is getting potentially smaller in contemporary Europe.
On the other hand, as the traditional representational links between parties and society get loose and inchoate, party patronage emerges as a critical factor in dealing with problems of party building and party organization. In this way, patronage compensates for a decaying presence on the ground. Patronage is also one of the ways by which parties deal with the expansion of the modern state into a huge number of agencies, regulatory bodies and advisory committees that characterize contemporary governance. That is why, although European countries differ significantly in the number of positions at the discretion of parties, as far as the rationale of patronage is concerned, we believe we have identified a widespread and common trend in the use of patronage as a means to consolidate parties as semi-state networks of public officials. In other words, what we suggest here is that the category of countries now represented, for example, by the Netherlands or the Czech Republic is likely to become an empirical norm in contemporary Europe. How long will Scandinavian countries represent a deviant trend to that norm in terms of the scope of patronage is a moot point, although it is clear that parties in those polities are likely to face more problems in (further) politicizing the state than parties in the countries such as Belgium or Austria, where the state had already been politicized to a large extent in the past.
Petr Kopecký is a Research Fellow of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) based at Leiden University. He was senior lecturer at the University of Sheffield, and Visiting Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, the South African Institute of International Affairs in Johannesburg, and the Ghana Centre for Democratic Development in Accra. His current research focuses on party patronage in contemporary democracies. He is the author of Parliaments in the Czech and Slovak Republics: Party Competition and Parliamentary Institutionalization (Ashgate, 2001), co-editor of Uncivil Society? Contentious Politics in Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2003), and editor of Political Parties and the State in Post-Communist Europe (Routledge, 2008).
Gerardo Scherlis is a PhD candidate at Leiden University, supported by the Alban Program from the European Commission. He previously studied Law and Political Science at the University of Buenos Aires. His main field of interest is political party organizations and his current research focuses on party patronage in Argentina from a comparative perspective.
