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West European Politics
ISSN: 0140-2382 (Print) 1743-9655 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fwep20
‘Jobs for the Boys’? Patterns of Party Patronage in
Post-Communist Europe
Petr Kopecký & Maria Spirova
To cite this article: Petr Kopecký & Maria Spirova (2011) ‘Jobs for the Boys’? Patterns of
Party Patronage in Post-Communist Europe, West European Politics, 34:5, 897-921, DOI:
10.1080/01402382.2011.591072
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2011.591072
Published online: 02 Aug 2011.
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‘Jobs for the Boys’? Patterns of Party
Patronage in Post-Communist
Europe
PETR KOPECKY´ and MARIA SPIROVA
This article examines the patterns of party patronage in post-communist Europe and
provides an explanation for the varying practices observed by stressing the institutional
legacies of the past. Drawing on the distinction between diﬀerent types of communist
regimes, it formulates three hypotheses concerning the extent, underlying motivations
and intra-party control of patronage which guide the empirical analysis. It then clariﬁes
the key concepts and discusses the methodology and data used in the article. Further,
the three hypotheses are probed with data collected in a large expert survey in Bulgaria,
Hungary and the Czech Republic. In accordance with the hypotheses, these three
countries are found to diﬀer in the pervasiveness of patronage within the state
institutions, in the reasons why party politicians engage in patronage practices and, to a
lesser degree, in the intra-party mechanisms of controlling and distributing patronage.
It is argued that this variation can be, at least partially, attributed to the nature of the
communist regimes in the countries under study.
Introduction
This article examines the patterns of party patronage in post-communist
Europe. The misuse of the state for partisan purposes, of which patronage is
a key form (van Biezen and Kopecky´ 2007; Kopecky´ and Scherlis 2008), has
generally been seen as high in the context of post-communist democracies.
The institutional legacies of a relatively weak state, coupled with the
emergence of resource-poor and power-hungry political parties, have
historically provided a fertile ground for the emergence of patronage
politics in many areas of the world (Bratton and van de Walle 1997;
Mainwaring 1999; van de Walle 2003). The post-communist states
approximate these historical conditions, making it likely that exploitative
patronage politics will emerge. However, the precise nature and scale of
patronage practices are also likely to diﬀer signiﬁcantly among the
Correspondence Address: kopecky@fsw.leidenuniv.nl; mspirova@fsw.leidenuniv.nl
West European Politics,
Vol. 34, No. 5, 897–921, September 2011
ISSN 0140-2382 Print/1743-9655 Online ª 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/01402382.2011.591072
post-communist states. Although communist countries fall broadly into the
same category of regimes, they did not share precisely the same institutional
characteristics and, at their inception, they were not grafted on the same
type of society. Consequently, state–society relations diﬀered markedly
among the communist countries. As we will show in this paper, these
diﬀerent institutional legacies do lead to variation in the patterns of party
patronage among the post-communist states.
The issue of party patronage in post-communist countries has already
been addressed in comparative research, most notably in the work of
O’Dwyer (2004, 2006) and Grzymala-Busse (2003, 2007) on the relationship
between party competition and state exploitation, and in the work on the
politicisation of the civil service (Meyer-Sahling 2004, 2008; Peters and
Pierre 2001; Dimitrov et al. 2006). We add to this rich literature in three
ways. First, we direct attention to institutional legacies in explaining the
variation in patronage practices. Second, we provide a precise conceptualisation
of patronage – focusing on party appointments within the state
sector. This conceptualisation, combined with an original empirical
measurement of patronage, allows us to assess the relative scale and level
of patronage practices among the post-communist countries. Third, related
to the latter, we also provide a wider East–West comparison that allows us
to appreciate the relative position of the new post-communist democracies
in relation to their longer-established Western European counterparts.
The article proceeds as follows. First, drawing on the distinction between
diﬀerent types of communist regimes, we formulate three hypotheses
concerning the extent, underlying motivations and intra-party control of
patronage which guide our empirical analysis. We then clarify the key
concepts and discuss the methodology and data used in the article. In the
third section, we probe our three hypotheses with data collected in a large
expert survey in Bulgaria, Hungary and the Czech Republic.1
We show that,
in accordance with our hypotheses, these three countries diﬀer in the
pervasiveness of patronage within the state institutions, in the reasons why
party politicians engage in patronage practices and, to a lesser degree, in the
intra-party mechanisms of controlling and distributing patronage.
How is Party Patronage Likely to Develop in the Post-communist
Democracies?
There is a wealth of literature that examines the origins and consequences of
patronage politics in democratic settings (see e.g. Eisenstadt and Lemarchand
1981; Piattoni 2001b; Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007). One of the most
inﬂuential theories concerning the origins of patronage and clientelistic
politics in modern democracies is Shefter’s (1994) theory about the relative
timing of bureaucratisation and the emergence of party competition.
Whether parties will adopt patronage strategies, according to Shefter,
depends on both the organisational origins of the party, and the character of
898 P. Kopecky´ and M. Spirova
bureaucracy at the inception of party competition. Externally created
parties, i.e. those that ﬁrst mobilised their voters and supporters without
being part of the institutional apparatus of the state, lacked the opportunity
to exploit the state for the purposes of party-building and electoral
mobilisation. These parties tended to rely on programmatic appeals and
mass organisation to overcome barriers for entry into the state arena. In
contrast, for the internally created parties, i.e. those with organisational
origins within the institutions, patronage was a viable option due to their
easy access to the state and its resources. As a result, these parties tended to
distribute divisible goods to beneﬁt their activists and supporters instead of,
or in addition to, focusing on programmatic appeals and on building
extensive electoral organisations. Importantly, however, Shefter also argues
that the opportunities for patronage were constrained by the type of
bureaucracy that existed at the inception of competitive party politics. If
party competition was introduced prior to the consolidation of the state and
its bureaucracy, political parties, irrespective of their origin, were inclined to
adopt patronage strategies. In contrast, when the state and bureaucracy
already enjoyed autonomy at the time of democratisation (i.e. introduction
of universal suﬀrage), they prevented the large scale selective distribution of
spoils by party leaders to their supporters.
Shefter’s theory was of course designed to shed light on the diﬀerences in
parties’ mobilisation strategies during the ﬁrst wave of democratisation in
Europe; in addition, his understanding of patronage was much broader, say
clientelistic (see discussion below), than our focus on politically motivated
distribution of state jobs in this article. However, we can apply an extended
version of Shefter’s theory to the post-communist countries, at least for two
reasons. Firstly, following the transition to democracy in the early 1990s,
party competition was introduced in those countries in the situation of
severe state reconstruction. Although communist states are generally seen to
be large and over-endowed, rather than weak and unconsolidated, their
administrative structures were severely challenged during the period of postcommunist
transformation (Cirtautas 1995; Ganev 2001). Indeed, state
bureaucracy in particular was, and continues to be, largely discredited, in no
small part because of the political nature of many appointments in the past
and the close association between the state and the communist parties.
Secondly, most political parties in the region originated, and continue to
originate even presently, as elite groups within parliaments and governments,
rather than as social movements outside the establishment. Postcommunist
parties are in that sense internally-created parties, whose life has
revolved around the institutions of the state from the outset of
democratisation (van Biezen 2003; Kopecky´ 2006; Spirova 2007). This
particular combination of state-(re)building on the one hand, and the inside
organisational origin of political parties on the other hand, would generally
lead us to expect party patronage or, as some other scholars term it,
politicisation of the state (Meyer-Sahling 2004) or state exploitation
Party Patronage in Post-Communist Europe 899
(Grzymala-Busse 2007), to be very high in post-communist Europe. It would
certainly be the logical extension of Shefter’s theory about the origins of
patronage politics.
This having been said, many scholars have also pointed out that not all
communist regimes and their administrative structures were the same during
the authoritarian period; the Eastern European communist regimes were
also not crafted on the same type of societies and same type of institutional
structures that preceded them. In that sense, it is better to speak about a
plurality of communist regimes, rather than the communist regime. Our key
argument is that, as a result of these diﬀerent conﬁgurations of communist
administrative and institutional arrangements, we are also likely to see
diverse patterns of patronage politics in the post-communist period. It
would be wrong to expect long-established political routines and administrative
practices to have disappeared with the regime at the end of the 1980s,
and it would be as mistaken to assume that the post-communist dynamics
follow a similar pattern. Much like the transformation of, for example, the
institutions of the market economy (see Stark and Bruszt 1998), patronage
politics is also likely to be at least partly shaped by particularistic practices
under the old regime. This, of course, does not mean that the observed
patterns of patronage politics are inevitable or irreversible, nor does it imply
that all observed variation is solely attributable to legacies of the past.
Rather, in line with the recent neo-institutional literature (see e.g. Olsen
2009), our analysis takes extant institutions of communist regimes as a point
of departure that allows us to formulate hypotheses about the likely
conﬁguration of patronage politics in the post-communist period.
What are the diﬀerent types of communist regimes and how are they likely
to shape patronage politics? For a coherent and suﬃciently general
formulation of the crucial diﬀerences among the communist regime types,
we draw here on the works of Kitschelt et al. (1999), and Grzymala-Busse
and Jones Luong (2002). Kitschelt and his co-authors have linked diﬀerent
variants of communist rule to the patterns of party competition in the postcommunist
period. Grzymala-Busse and Jones Luong have made a
connection between institutions inherited from the communist regime and
the patterns of state-building processes following the collapse of communist
rule. Both groups of scholars share our basic premise that post-communist
dynamics are shaped and constrained by unique institutional legacies.
Kitschelt et al. (1999: 21–8) make a distinction between three types of
communist regimes: patrimonial communism, national-accommodative
communism and bureaucratic-authoritarian communism. One of the key
dimensions that sets these types of communist regimes apart, and which is of
high relevance to our analysis of party patronage, is the operating principle
of the state apparatus. The administrative and bureaucratic structures in
patrimonial communism are poorly developed. The operation of the state is
to a large extent based on individual politicians’ patronage networks, small
nepotistic cliques and corrupt circles of power holders. In contrast, the
900 P. Kopecky´ and M. Spirova
bureaucratic communism is characterised by a high degree of rationalbureaucratic
institutionalisation and a great adherence to impersonal rules;
it is also marked by the existence of a technocratic administrative machine
relatively impervious to the interference of competing interests. Nationalaccommodative
communism has elements of both. Like the bureaucraticauthoritarian
type, it displays highly developed bureaucratic structures.
However, in contrast to it, patronage politics plays a more signiﬁcant role as
a modus operandi within the state, principally as the means by which the
regime accommodates competing interests from within the ruling party and
the dissent coming from outside of it.2
Similarly, in their work Grzymala-Busse and Jones Luong (2002: 539–41)
point to the distinction between codiﬁed and depersonalised, or discretionary
and personalised, structures through which post-communist
political elites channel their competition. The former are characterised by
a great degree of procedural predictability and impersonality, the latter by
informal practices and the lack of oﬃcial codiﬁcation. According to
Grzymala-Busse and Jones Luong, the distinction between formal and
informal rules and procedures constitutes one of the crucial dimensions that
help to explain diﬀerent patterns of state-building in the post-communist
period. Importantly, and much in the same vein as Kitschelt et al., they
argue that whether the formal or informal mechanisms of elite competition
dominate as the modus operandi in the post-communist period depends, to
a very large extent, on whether a well-developed central state apparatus was
inherited and available at the point of communist collapse.
We build on these distinctions concerning the diﬀerent institutional
legacies of communism to shed light on the practices of patronage in postcommunist
Europe. There are at least three direct implications of extant
institutional settings of the post-communist period for the type of patronage
politics that we should observe. The ﬁrst one concerns the relative scope and
range of patronage politics. Democracies emerging from the patrimonial
communist types are likely to display the highest levels of patronage. The
reason is that extensive patronage networks already exist at the outset of
democratisation; in addition, poorly developed administrative structures
inherited from patrimonial communism will lack autonomy to resist
colonisation by such new oﬃce-holders. In contrast, democracies emerging
from the bureaucratic-authoritarian type are likely to display the lowest
levels of patronage. This is so because the distinction between the ruling
party and the technical state apparatus was already stronger under
communism and hence it is likely that the state bureaucracy will enjoy a
greater degree of autonomy and power to resist colonisation by political
actors after the transition. Democracies emerging from the nationalaccommodative
communist types should show levels of patronage
substantially higher than these of the previously bureaucratic-authoritarian
regimes, but still lower than those of the ex-patrimonial ones. On the one
hand, the state will be suﬃciently well-developed to contain large islands of
Party Patronage in Post-Communist Europe 901
institutional autonomy and technocratic bureaucracy. On the other hand,
because of the inherited culture of ‘accommodative patronage’, these welldeveloped
governance structures will be subject to frequent interference
from politicians keen to use the state and its institutions for political
purposes. These arguments yield the following hypothesis:
H1: The level of patronage practices will be highest in post-communist
democracies emerging from patrimonial communism, lower in the
previously national-accommodative regimes, and lowest in the former
bureaucratic-authoritarian ones.
The second implication concerns the motivations for patronage politics.
Since, as we shall see below, our principal empirical concern with patronage
in this article is the distribution of state jobs, the question here is why do
(party) politicians engage in appointments within the state apparatus. In
general, one can draw a distinction between two diﬀerent motivations: a
desire to control state institutions, by appointing like-minded individuals to
them, usually in order to ensure formulation and implementation of policies
compatible with politicians’ aims; and a desire to reward party or
politicians’ supporters, activists or even friends and family (i.e. nepotism)
(Kopecky´ and Scherlis 2008). Where oﬃcial channels and formal power
structures dominate decision-making within the state, as in the bureaucraticauthoritarian
communist type, it is likely that patronage politics will
primarily be motivated by the desire to control state institutions in the postcommunist
period as well. The state apparatus is also quite large in this type,
which means that party politicians will face a need to exert control over a
large set of institutions. In contrast, traditional spoils politics – use of the
state institutions for rewards of all kinds – is likely to be the chief motivation
for patronage politics within the highly informal decision-making structures
characterising democracies emerging from patrimonial communism.
Democracies emerging from national-accommodative communism to
some extent follow the logic applicable to the bureaucratic-authoritarian
type. However, as indicated above, while national-accommodative communism
is also marked by the existence of technocratic and professional
administrative elites, the separation between the state apparatus and the
ruling elite is frequently breached in order to satisfy the needs of competing
political actors. Therefore, cognitively and culturally, patronage politics will
be seen as more acceptable and legitimate in those democracies than in
democracies emerging from bureaucratic-authoritarian communism. As a
result, a mix of control and reward is likely to be the chief motivating factor
for patronage politics in governance structures of democracies emerging
from national-accommodative communism. We should expect that:
H2: Patronage politics in post-communist democracies emerging from
patrimonial communism will be driven by a desire to reward party
902 P. Kopecky´ and M. Spirova
supporters, that in former bureaucratic-authoritarian regimes by a desire
to control the state institutions, and that in former national-accommodative
regimes by a mixture of both.
The third implication of diﬀerent institutional legacies concerns the intraparty
mechanisms of party patronage. In general, the term party patronage
is fraught with diﬃculties because in practice it is hard to distinguish
whether a patronage exchange is made by the party, or by an individual
politician. Indeed, given our concern with state jobs in this article, it is clear
that the vast majority of appointments within modern states are oﬃcially
done by individual politicians (the ministers) and, in that sense at least,
party patronage rarely exists. The key question therefore becomes to what
extent is the party involved when the minister makes the appointment; i.e. is
it the party that is the principal and the minister that is the agent or the
other way around? In some cases, the party possesses such strong internal
mechanisms of co-ordination and control that politicians who are in oﬃce in
the name of the party merely appoint whoever the central oﬃce proposes. In
other cases, individual politicians appoint from within their own networks
of candidates with parties being basically empty organisational shells, a
pattern eloquently analysed in a recent work on Argentina (Scherlis 2010).
It is likely that such highly personalised patterns of patronage politics
within party organisations will dominate in countries emerging from
patrimonial communism. In contrast, bureaucratic communist types will
have already provided a wealth of experience with operation in rigid party
organisations, conduct of regularised party congresses and organisation of
other such events, which is likely to result in the greater propensity for
building stronger party organisations that will constrain the freedom of
individual politicians in the post-communist period. The national-accommodative
type of communism is unlikely to diﬀer very much from the
bureaucratic communist type in this respect. Therefore, we should expect a
diﬀerence between democracies emerging from patrimonial communism on
the one hand, and democracies emerging from both the bureaucraticauthoritarian
and national-accommodative type of communism on the
other hand. Therefore:
H3: In post-communist democracies emerging from patrimonial communism,
the party is likely to play a minor role in controlling patronage
in comparison to that of individual politicians. The reverse is expected in
democracies emerging from the bureaucratic-authoritarian and nationalaccommodative
types of communism.
As a ﬁnal caveat to these empirical expectations, it is important to point out
again that our claim is not that party patronage (or politicisation of the state
apparatus) is going to be altogether absent in post-communist democracies
emerging from the bureaucratic-authoritarian regime. Just like Kitschelt
Party Patronage in Post-Communist Europe 903
et al., and Grzymala-Busse and Jones Luong, we are well aware of the fact
that communist states and bureaucracies were all to some degree subjected
to the ruling parties’ political control; in addition, even the bureaucraticauthoritarian
regimes displayed a mix of formal and informal rules,
including some patronage and nepotistic networks, for example the grey
economy. Indeed, pace Shefter, we do expect post-communist countries in
general to belong to a middle zone of patronage politics and display levels of
state politicisation higher than the consolidated states and bureaucracies in
Western Europe. This is in fact the ﬁrst general comparison which we are
going to make in the subsequent empirical part of this paper. But we start
with a note on method, data and concepts.
Method, Data and Concepts
In order to probe our theoretical expectations, we use a comparative
analysis of three post-communist countries – Bulgaria, the Czech Republic
and Hungary. Bulgaria is an example of a post-communist democracy
emerging from the patrimonial communist regime while the Czech Republic
is a case of bureaucratic-authoritarian communist legacy (see Kitschelt et al.
1999). Hungary, together with for example Poland, is often seen as classic
case of national-accommodative communist regime.3
The three cases are
also useful because they share similarities with one another, mainly
institutional variables that might inﬂuence party patronage. These include
the type of executive–legislative relations (all are parliamentary system of
government), the electoral system (Bulgaria and the Czech Republic both
use PR electoral systems with open lists; Hungary uses a mixed system
whereby half of the parliaments is elected by PR with open lists and half in
single-member districts), and the format of their party system (all are multiparty
systems with moderate fragmentation).
At the time of research (2006–08), all three countries were governed by
coalition cabinets. In Bulgaria, an oversized majority coalition of the
Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP), National Movement Simeon the Second
(NDSV) and the Movement for Rights and Freedom (DPS) had been in
power since 2005. In the Czech Republic, the Civic Democratic Party
(ODS), the Christian Democratic Union – the People’s Party (KDU–Cˇ SL),
and the Greens (SZ) formed a narrow majority coalition in early 2007, while
in Hungary, the Socialist Party (MSZP) and the Union of Free Democrats
(SZDSZ) had been in power since 2006.4
These governments represent
major parties in the political systems in the three countries; none of them
represent a break with the past (such as, for example, the 2001–05 cabinet in
Bulgaria). In addition, our data indicate that there were no major changes in
the practice of patronage over the last decade or so, thus giving us more
conﬁdence in arguing that the practices we observe during the study period
represent the general trends in the countries.
904 P. Kopecky´ and M. Spirova
The data that we use to test our hypotheses come from an expert survey
conducted by country teams in 18 old and new democracies.5
Here we use
detailed data for Bulgaria, Hungary and Czech Republic, and aggregate
comparative data for them and 12 other European democracies.6
Experts
were chosen from within four major groups: academia, the non-governmental
sector, media and the civil service, using the expertise of the
researchers complemented in some cases by a limited use of the snowball
technique.7
The potential bias inherent in using data from a small group of
experts was prevented in several ways. First, we stressed the variety in the
background of the experts and on their expertise and experience in the
policy area. Furthermore, surveys were conducted face-to-face by country
teams who invested about two months in the ﬁeldwork for each country and
were themselves familiar with the formal regulation of patronage. Last, the
interviews had both open- and closed-ended questions and allowed for
detailed discussion of the issues investigated in addition to the categorical
assessment.
Our respondents were chosen as experts knowledgeable about appointments
to institutions in nine diﬀerent policy areas (judiciary, economy,
ﬁnance, foreign aﬀairs, welfare, media, military and police, culture and
education, and regional/local government). To obtain as accurate and detailed
information about patronage practices as possible, each of those nine diﬀerent
policy areas were also divided into three types of institutions: ministries;
NDACs – non-departmental agencies and commissions; and executing
institutions – policy delivering and commercial institutions, such as, for
example, state-owned enterprises (economy), hospitals (welfare) or foreign
embassies (foreign aﬀairs). The experts responded to a uniform questionnaire
in face-to-face interviews, with ﬁve closed-ended and six open-ended questions
probing into the pervasiveness, persistence and several other aspects of the
party patronage practices within their policy area of expertise.
One important conceptual caveat concerns the deﬁnition of patronage. In
contrast to most studies of particularistic exchanges and state exploitation,
we use a relatively narrow but also more precise concept of party patronage,
limiting the phenomenon to its most widespread form: appointments
(Kopecky´ et al. 2012; Mu¨ ller 2006; Sorauf 1959; Wilson 1973). Unlike many
other studies in the ﬁeld of patronage politics, which include various
personal rewards and gifts, allocation of public service projects, contracts or
licences, pork-barrel legislation etc. as the forms of patronage, this article is
only concerned with the ability of political parties to appoint their own
members and other individuals to positions in the public and semi public
sector and the practical exercise of this ability. In other words, our major
empirical concern is to establish how far political parties in Bulgaria, the
Czech Republic and Hungary control the allocation of jobs and other
important public positions.
We therefore see patronage as related but conceptually and empirically
distinct from both clientelism (i.e. exchange of beneﬁts in order to secure
Party Patronage in Post-Communist Europe 905
votes) and from corruption (i.e. illegal exchange of money for favourable
public decisions).8
Patronage appointments are not inherently clientelistic,
since jobs can be handed out in order to control policy formulation and
implementation, and not just to buy votes or reward organisational loyalty,
the point we already raised in the formulation of our second hypothesis.
Patronage appointments are not inherently corrupt because many jobs at
the gift of party politicians are legally sanctioned. This of course does not
mean that jobs cannot be used in a clientelistic way, for example as a way of
appeasing and accommodating various competing interests within the state.
Similarly, obtaining a high-proﬁle job in state administration can merely be
the ﬁrst step for illegal personal enrichment of party politicians or their
supporters; controlling key state positions, for example in the police
apparatus, can also be used by parties to prevent criminal investigations into
their questionable funding. In these cases, patronage becomes perilously
close to corruption. In that sense, though distinct, patronage is a necessary
condition for both clientelism and corruption. Without the ability to control
the state via appointments, parties would not be in the position to provide
targeted selective beneﬁts to their constituencies, or have something to oﬀer
in order to secure illicit party funding.
Empirical Analysis
Patronage in the Post-communist World
As indicated above, we ﬁrst try to locate the post-communist countries
within the larger pool of European democracies. We speciﬁcally investigate
whether the level of patronage in the post-communist countries is higher
than in Western Europe. We present some aggregate comparative data for
the level of patronage practices in our 15 European democracies (Figure 1).
For this purpose we report the values of the Index of Patronage, which we
have composed based on the survey answers. It is a standardised score with
a value of 1 indicating that patronage practices approximate a full overlap
of party and the state and a value of 0 indicating no party politicisation of
the state. However, in order to interpret the actual values of the index
reported in the ﬁgure, it might be useful to clarify that a value of around
0.65 should be interpreted to mean that parties appoint in most institutions
at all levels of the administration, a value of around 0.4 that parties appoint
in most institutions at top and middle level, and a value of 0.1 that parties
appoint in a limited number of institutions at only the top level. In other
words, index values of around 0.4 represent quite pervasive patronage
practices.
In our sample of countries, the United Kingdom displayed the lowest
level of patronage with an index of 0.09 and Greece leads with a score of
0.62. The three post-communist countries included in the sample appear to
be grouped in the higher end and are at or above the mean for the group.
906 P. Kopecky´ and M. Spirova
However, they are also not displaying the highest level of patronage
practices, which seem to be located in Greece, Austria and Italy, long
considered traditional patronage countries in Europe (Mu¨ ller 2007).
Interestingly, however, the more established democracies in Europe also
do not display a uniform trend in the level of patronage. While party
appointments in the state institutions seem to be quite low in the Northern
European countries such as the UK and the Netherlands, they seem to pick
up substantially as we move south. This makes us question the standard of
non-politicised bureaucracy that scholars often attribute to the ‘established
democracies in Western Europe’. Our analysis suggests that this benchmark
for ‘normality’ is derived from observing state structures in Northern
European countries which, in the face of the data, may be more an exception
than a rule in the general European context.
Levels of Patronage in Bulgaria, Hungary and the Czech Republic
Focusing on the three post-communist countries, we expect to ﬁnd the level
of patronage practices in Bulgaria higher than those in the Czech Republic,
and also higher than those in Hungary, in line with our Hypothesis 1.
Figure 2 presents the comparative trends in the three countries, but the data
are disaggregated to present the trends along the three institutional types
that we have speciﬁed: ministries, non-departmental agencies and commissions
(NDACs) and executing institutions (EIs).
FIGURE 1
INDEX OF PATRONAGE, EUROPEAN DEMOCRACIES
Party Patronage in Post-Communist Europe 907
The index of patronage for the three countries displays more extensive
patronage practices in Bulgaria and Hungary than in the Czech Republic,
oﬀering support for our hypothesis that the legacy of bureaucratic
authoritarianism will lead to the most constraints on patronage practices.
The value of the index is 0.42 for Bulgaria, indicating a medium to high level
of patronage, while the one for the Czech Republic at 0.34 points to weak to
medium patronage practices. The value of the index for Hungary is 0.43,
suggesting that patronage is at least as pervasive in Hungary’s political
system as it is in Bulgaria, a ﬁnding that is not quite in line with our
expectations.
The overall value of the index, however, hides some ﬁner diﬀerences
between the practices of patronage in the three countries which we will
examine below. If we look at the disaggregated data, several distinctions
emerge. First, while the extent of patronage appears very much the same in
the core civil service in Bulgaria, Hungary and the Czech Republic, this
changes as we move away from the ministerial bureaucracy. The index of
patronage in the ministries is consistently high for all three countries – 0.61,
0.65 and 0.67, respectively. It indicates that in all three countries party
appointments follow relatively similar logic. Parties appoint to positions
that are legally political, such as ministers, deputy ministers and their
political cabinets, and regularly also reach into the top levels of the civil
service that should not be political to replace people in positions such as
FIGURE 2
BULGARIA, HUNGARY AND THE CZECH REPUBLIC: INDEX OF PATRONAGE,
BY INSTITUTIONAL TYPE AND OVERALL
908 P. Kopecky´ and M. Spirova
general secretaries of the ministries. In all three countries, parties are also
very likely to reach into the middle levels of the civil service and replace the
heads of ministerial sections/departments (although the practice might vary
from one ministry to another). In exceptional cases lower civil service
positions such as experts and administrative personnel would also become
subjects of patronage appointments. This common trend we take as an
illustration of the shared tendency to engage in patronage appointments in
the post-communist world.
The values of the index for the other two institutional types reveal more
divergent practices and it is here that we, in fact, see the legacies of the
diﬀering logics of the previous regimes. For all three countries, patronage is
more limited in the NDACs than for the core ministerial bureaucracy.
However, in Bulgaria the practice is still more common, as the index of
patronage (0.34) illustrates, substantially higher than that in the Czech
Republic (0.25), and slightly higher than in Hungary (0.30). What this
implies is that in the agencies, Bulgarian parties replace the top level
management consistently across the majority of these organisations, while in
the Czech Republic this practice is more irregular. Just as in ministries, the
index value for the practice in the Hungarian agencies is between the values
for the other two countries.
The diﬀerence among the levels of patronage practices in the executing
institutions in the three countries is even more substantial; indeed it is here
that we see a clear diﬀerence between Bulgaria and Hungary on the one hand,
and the Czech Republic on the other. In the former two countries, patronage
remains at moderate levels (at 0.32–0.34) while in the Czech Republic it
reaches minimal levels (0.14). The higher scores for both Bulgaria and
Hungary seem to indicate that parties in these two countries uniformly
appoint at the top levels of the executing institutions – to positions such as
managers of state-owned companies or directors of schools. However, in
both cases, a closer examination of the data reveals that the overall score is
driven by the extremely high level of patronage practices in the executing
institutions of several of the policy areas – the media and economy in
Hungary and foreign service in Bulgaria – while in others, patronage is nonexistent
at any level (culture and education in Hungary and the judiciary in
both countries) (Meyer-Sahling and Jager 2012).
This leads us to the second speciﬁc distinction in the practices of
patronage in the Czech Republic, on the one hand, and Bulgaria and
Hungary, on the other: variation among policy areas. In the Czech
Republic, the policy area inﬂuences the extent of patronage much less than it
does in Bulgaria and in Hungary. The index (not reported here because of
space limitations) shows very small variation among the diﬀerent areas in
the Czech Republic – and in the ministerial bureaucracy we actually observe
a very consistent pattern (see Kopecky´ 2012 for more details). In other
words, the practice of patronage in the culture and education area, for
example, is very similar to that in the economy. In Bulgaria, we observe
Party Patronage in Post-Communist Europe 909
higher variation along substantive lines, but most of the policy areas still fall
within moderate to high levels of patronage. In contrast, in Hungary we can
clearly see policy areas that are ‘partially insulated’ from patronage and
areas that can be called ‘captured’ by the parties (Meyer-Sahling and Jager
2012; see also Meyer-Sahling 2008). What this suggests, we believe, is that
parties in Bulgaria and Hungary are in general much more willing to engage
in patronage practices than in the Czech Republic, and that it is only the
particular constraints in some policy areas that prevent higher actual levels
of patronage appointments.
For example, the ministries that appear to be least prone to suﬀer from
party sweeps after every election in Bulgaria are the Ministry of Finance and
the Ministries of Defence and Internal Aﬀairs. There, our evidence suggests,
appointments happen exclusively at the top level. In the case of the Ministry
of Finance, parties have been constrained in their attempt to appoint people
to positions in them by two related factors. One is the centrality of ﬁnancial
reforms in the country and the risks involved in failing at them. Parties have
been unwilling to be exclusively associated with control of the ﬁnancial
sector and have sought to share this with others. In fact, in the 2005–09
Bulgarian government, the ﬁnance minister himself was not a party
appointment, but a choice of the three coalition partners. Second, since
the late 1990s, as a result of the loans extended to the country, the Bulgarian
ﬁnancial sector has been under the close supervision of the International
Monetary Fund, which has scrutinised all major decisions taken and policies
implemented. As a result, even if parties displayed a desire to replace
personnel beyond the legally sanctioned positions, they have had to account
for these to this external body, making sweeping party patronage virtually
impossible.
In contrast, the ministries that are the most patronage-ridden are those of
Culture and Education. There, party inﬂuence often reaches to the bottom
levels to replace technical and service personnel such as secretaries, drivers
and cleaners. The explanation for this is, of course, partially the ﬂip side of
the one above. These ministries are of little interests to any actors outside
Bulgaria – the European Union, for example, has little regulation on social
policy or culture policy – and, as a consequence, parties are left free to ﬁll
these ministries with their own appointees. Even domestically, they are not
of such high policy relevance, making domestic scrutiny of party patronage
within them less likely.
In Hungary, the diﬀerence in the level of patronage practices also seems to
depend on the institutional constraints in each policy area. For example, the
somewhat limited patronage practices in the agencies of the ﬁnance and
economy sector are arguably attributable to high exposure to the private
sector and the importance of the international ﬁnancial institutions (MeyerSahling
and Jager 2012). In contrast, the media sector is highly subject to
political party appointments because of both party interests and unregulated
practices, leading to few institutional constraints on party appointments.
910 P. Kopecky´ and M. Spirova
Even though we do not observe anything like this great variation in the
Czech Republic, we still have reasons to believe that some policy areas are
considered ‘islands of excellence’ and are thus freer of patronage practices.
Just as in Bulgaria and Hungary, the ﬁnancial sector is probably the best
example here. In all three types of institutions of the ﬁnance sector, we
observe a very limited scope of patronage appointments largely due the high
professional demands on the job. The ﬁnance ministry has more personnel
continuity than any other ministries; in fact the Finance Minister in
Fischer’s caretaker cabinet (2009–10) was one of the longest-serving, nonpolitical
deputy ministers in the country. Further, in only one of the
ﬁnancial NDACs – the now defunct Czech Consolidation Agency – were
appointments political. Finally, in the absence of state banks, the Czech
National Bank is the only place where political parties could try to inﬂuence
appointments, especially appointments of the governors. However, these
appointments are solely the responsibility of the Czech President.
Overall, the data on the scope and depth of patronage appointments in
Bulgaria, Hungary and the Czech Republic oﬀer support for our hypothesis
and its expectation of more extensive patronage in the Bulgarian political
system and its legacy of paternalistic communist regime than in the Czech
case where the bureaucracy has been seen as more powerful prior to 1989.
Hungary, somewhat against our expectations, displays extent and logic of
patronage practices very similar to those of Bulgaria. Party appointments
seem to be very consistent in the ministries in the three countries – they
reach far and deep into the core ministerial bureaucracy. As we move away
from the ministries – where in reality party power is concentrated – party
appointments decrease both in terms of the number of institutions where
they are made and in terms of the depth at which they are made. Patronage
becomes both narrower and shallower as we move into the regulatory and
advisory institutions in all three countries, and, in the Czech Republic, even
more so as we move into the executing institutions. In Bulgaria and
Hungary, the only substantial diﬀerence is between the ministries and the
rest of our institutional types. Thus, parties in these two countries seem to
reach further and deeper into the structures of the non-ministerial state
institutions than do their Czech counterparts (Meyer-Sahling and Jager
2012). This shared trend is particularly visible in policy areas without
external political constraints.
The Motivations of Patronage
Our second hypothesis is related to the motivations behind the practice of
patronage in the two countries. Consistent with our argument stressing
legacies of the past, we expect to ﬁnd reward as a more dominant motivation
of party appointments in Bulgaria, control as the more prevalent one in the
Czech Republic, and Hungary displaying a mixture of both. To test this
hypothesis, we report simpler statistics based on our expert survey. Our
Party Patronage in Post-Communist Europe 911
respondents were asked to identify the dominant motivation of patronage
appointments by choosing among four options, ‘reward’, ‘control’, ‘both’ or
‘other’ and explaining their choice. Figure 3 reports the percentage of
respondents that gave each answer in the three countries.
The data suggest that patronage in the Czech Republic is mostly
motivated by a desire to ‘control’ the state institutions. Over 65 per cent of
our respondents identify it as the dominant motivation in the Czech
Republic. Less than 10 per cent think rewarding members and activists
drives the practice of patronage, while about a quarter of the respondents
believe both rewards and control are reasons behind the parties’
appointments. The situation is diﬀerent in Bulgaria, where the motivations
behind patronage appointments include, clearly, both the desire to reward
loyal members and activists and to control the state institutions. Overall, 39
per cent of our respondents pointed to ‘control’ as the single dominant
motivation in Bulgaria, while the same proportion thought parties
appointed both to reward and control, and about 12 per cent attributed
the desire to appoint exclusively to rewarding members. About 8 per cent
saw a diﬀerent motivation as guiding parties in appointing people. In
Hungary, reward by itself plays an insigniﬁcant role (only 2.6 per cent of our
respondents chose it as a single answer), but control is also not the single
most important driving motivation. Thus, while patronage pursued only for
the sake of reward is unusual, rewarding activists with high-level jobs in
certain policy and institutional loci is also a reality.
FIGURE 3
THE MOTIVATIONS OF PATRONAGE, BULGARIA, HUNGARY
AND THE CZECH REPUBLIC (%)
912 P. Kopecky´ and M. Spirova
This overall picture supports our second hypothesis, but it is also
interesting to investigate what precisely control and reward means in the
three settings. The trends in these interpretations also reveal important
diﬀerences between the countries. While a lot of the patronage that happens
in the Bulgarian and Czech state institutions is motivated by a desire to
control them, the precise interpretation of what control entails is not as
clear-cut. There are at least three motivations discernible under the broad
label of control: control of policy-making process, control of the political
content/media coverage and control of corruption.
Parties like to have people that they can trust in positions of authority in the
state institutions so that they can rely on them to carry out the policies
formulated by the government. This is the case in all three countries. In
Bulgaria, this was particularly strong during the late 1990s, when the reformist
government of 1997–2001 was faced with the need to carry out sweeping
reforms in most of the policy areas of the state. For these purposes, they also
‘need[ed] their own people’. Patronage thus became part of the democratisation
reform in the country. While the incumbent governments in the three
countries were not faced with such major reforms during 2006–08, we ﬁnd that
the need to situate people in the top positions of the state administration in
order to ensure quick and eﬀective policy implementation was a common
motivation behind the patronage appointments in all three countries.
In addition, parties often want to control the direct outputs of the state
sector. What is being taught in the high schools in the country, for example,
is of interest to the political parties because it has a direct impact on
the political dynamics, one of our Bulgarian interviewees argued. Similarly,
the outputs of the state-owned media could be of great consequence for the
parties at election times. While this trend might be somewhat stronger in
Bulgaria and Hungary, having loyal people in the leadership and controlling
agencies of national television and radio is seen as a political beneﬁt by the
parties in all three countries.
Finally, some patronage appointments in various higher level positions
are openly linked to controlling corrupt practices. This seems to be more
common in Bulgaria and in Hungary than in the Czech Republic. For
example, membership in the Drug Board, or the commission that distributes
radio frequencies in Bulgaria, is seen as a lucrative position because it allows
control of the access and thus opens the way to corrupt schemes of various
kinds. Similarly, in Hungary, the allocation of licences, permits, contracts
and subsidies in all sectors, but particularly in the media and culture, is
carried out by political appointees, opening the door to risk of corruption in
the private sector (Meyer-Sahling and Jager 2012). Although more limited,
this practice is also present in the Czech Republic. There, our respondents
suggest, parties have established questionable links to institutions such as
the consolidation agency and the energy regulators in order to solicit party
funding, as well as to the police secret services and anti-corruption units
which control the penalisation of illegal activities.
Party Patronage in Post-Communist Europe 913
In contrast to the numerous interpretations of the control function of
patronage, the reward one is relatively clear: individuals want positions in
the state institutions because they guarantee money and/or prestige and
parties are willing to reward their party members and activists by providing
them with these positions. This process is rare in the Czech Republic and
isolated in Hungary, but common in Bulgaria; there parties often face a
strong demand for patronage from their members, especially in the areas
outside the capital where incomes are substantially lower. This was
particularly so for the Bulgarian Socialist Party (one of the incumbent
parties in the 2006–07 period) for several reasons. To begin with, the party
inherited a strong tradition of patronage from the communist times. In
addition, when the Socialists came to power in 2005, they had been in
opposition for about eight years, which further whetted their appetite for
patronage appointments. Finally, as they tend to appeal more to the lower
income, rural electorate, their supporters and members also tend to be more
likely to desire a position in the regional administration or other state
institutions.
However, this is not to say that low-level positions are the only ones given
out as rewards. In fact, in all three countries some high-level ones – such as
board membership in the state-owned companies, certain ambassadorships
and other positions in the Foreign Service – are also subject to party
appointments. In these cases, naturally, the appointees are usually higher
ranking party leaders rather than rank and ﬁle members. In both cases,
however, party loyalists are being rewarded for their past services with
certain – higher or lower paying, or simply prestigious – jobs.
Overall, the data on the motivations of patronage in the three countries
support our expectations of more reward-driven patronage in Bulgaria,
more control-dominated patronage in the Czech Republic, and mixed in
Hungary. This trend transpires when we look at our aggregate indicators
but is particularly solidiﬁed when we look at the diﬀerent interpretations of
the control and reward function in the three political systems. We ﬁnally
supplement this argument by presenting some data on the nature of the
actual people who get appointed to patronage positions. In our survey, we
asked the respondents to identify why certain people are chosen to be party
appointees by listing all that apply of three possible reasons: professionalism,
political allegiance or individual allegiance, or provide an alternative
one. We expect to ﬁnd that if the motivation to control prevails in the
patronage practice in the country, then professional qualiﬁcations should be
at least as important as ‘appointee characteristics’ as political links, let alone
personal links. Figure 4 presents the percentage of respondents giving each
of the answers.
The data support our expectations: while the political allegiance as a
required characteristic for patronage appointees is similar in all three
countries, professionalism is clearly more so in the Czech Republic and
Hungary than in Bulgaria; 80 per cent of our Czech respondents and 75 per
914 P. Kopecky´ and M. Spirova
cent of our Hungarian respondents listed it as a necessary condition to be
appointed, while less than 60 per cent did so in Bulgaria.
This complements the picture of the most reward-oriented pattern of
patronage appointments in Bulgaria, less so in Hungary and least so and
most control-oriented in the Czech Republic, and provides further support
for our second hypothesis. It appears that the legacy of patrimonial
communism is associated with higher likelihood of parties to distribute
patronage as a reward, while the tradition of bureaucratic autonomy in the
Czech Republic has been reﬂected in a more policy-oriented patronage. In
this regard, out expectations regarding the legacy of Hungary’s national
accommodative regime are also conﬁrmed.
The Party Mechanics of Patronage Appointments
Our last hypothesis suggested that in countries emerging from patrimonial
communism such as Bulgaria individual politicians rather than parties as
organised entities are more likely to play the leading role in controlling
patronage, while the reverse is expected in the countries of the other two
types. To investigate this hypothesis, we use the open-ended question that
asked our respondents to identify the mechanisms through which parties
choose people to be appointed to the state positions. The data are only
analysed qualitatively.
FIGURE 4
QUALIFICATIONS OF APPOINTEES, BULGARIA, HUNGARY
AND THE CZECH REPUBLIC (%)
Party Patronage in Post-Communist Europe 915
There seems to be no – or at least only indirect evidence – to support this
ﬁnal hypothesis. The patterns of patronage appointments are not more
personalised in Bulgaria compared to the Czech Republic or Hungary. In
fact, it seems that politicians in executive positions (such as ministers) are
the most important centres of appointing power in all three countries.
Against this common background, however, we do observe some diﬀerences
on two main features: the presence (or lack of) of an established mechanism
for keeping track and recruiting appointees within the party; and the extent
to which the party in public oﬃce is free from pressures from the party in
central oﬃce or the party on the ground when making the patronage
appointments. The variation that we observe, however, seems to be driven
more by party-level factors such as organisational origins and evolution,
rather than by system-level factors such as the legacy of the previous regime.
The variation that we do observe seems to be related to the organisational
nature of the political parties. Some parties display well coordinated
mechanisms for patronage appointments. These are either the older parties
which have longer and uninterrupted histories, clear constituencies and
established structures, such as the BSP and the KDU-Cˇ SL in the Czech
Republic, or parties that have evolved organisationally since 1990s and for
which building these mechanisms has become part of organisational
maturity. The latter include the DPS in Bulgaria, FIDESZ (Hungarian
Civic Union) in Hungary and the ODS and the Czech Social Democratic
Party (Cˇ SSD) in the Czech Republic. FIDESZ, for example, was able to
carry out much better coordinated personnel appointments once it had
developed the networks and built its organisation by the early 2000s (MeyerSahling
2008: 41). In contrast, newer parties such as the NDSV in Bulgaria,
or less cohesive parties such as the SZDSZ in Hungary, the Bulgarian Union
of Democratic Forces (SDS) and the SZ in the Czech Republic do not have
these mechanisms. In these parties patronage appointments are made in an
ad hoc manner and based almost exclusively on the individual preferences of
the leaders.
On the second dimension, for some parties patronage is also used as a link
with the constituency, which necessitates higher coordination and control of
this process by the party as an organisation. In parties such as the BSP in
Bulgaria and the KDU-Cˇ SL in the Czech Republic, the party on the ground
(and in central oﬃce) plays much greater and more autonomous role in the
patronage process. In these parties, appointments are sometimes made under
the pressure of various regional or factional organisational units. While
Meyer-Sahling (2008: 39–40) describes similar processes in the Hungarian
MDF in the early to mid 1990s, none of the Hungarian parties examined
displayed these features. Instead, all of the Hungarian parties and most of the
parties that we studied in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic allow the party in
public oﬃce to be the dominant actor in making the patronage appointments.
While the patterns that we observe do not support our expectation of a
country-level correspondence between the type of communist regime and the
916 P. Kopecky´ and M. Spirova
nature of intra-party mechanics of patronage, it could be argued that the
diﬀerent organisational logics of the individual parties under study do, in
fact, reﬂect, among other things, the legacy of the previous regime. Parties
forming in the immediate legacy of the bureaucratic communism are more
likely to channel political activity via formal procedures and build stronger
organisations, while parties emerging in the context of the patrimonial
regimes are more likely to maintain a particularistic approach to the
political process.
Conclusion
The aim of this article was to examine the patterns of party patronage,
understood as party appointments within the state institutions, in postcommunist
Europe and to look for the inﬂuence of the legacy of the
communist regimes on these contemporary patterns. Our evidence provided
support for our starting assumption and the ﬁrst two hypotheses that we
formulated at the outset of the article, but only indirect support for our
third one. The post-communist countries included in a sample of 15
European democracies for which we present data do cluster in the higherpatronage
end of the group, although they do not display the highest levels
of patronage in the sample. Further, patronage is more extensive in
Bulgaria, an example of a country that has emerged from patrimonial
communism, than in the Czech Republic, which was bureaucraticauthoritarian;
the diﬀerences become especially telling once we disaggregate
the data and look at practices of patronage in diﬀerent types of institutions
and policy areas. Similarly, the data support our expectation that patronage
will be used more for the purposes of controlling the policy-making and
implementation process than for rewarding party loyalists in the Czech
Republic while the reverse will be true in Bulgaria. This ﬁnding was further
corroborated by the detailed interpretation of these motivations provided by
our individual answers, and data on the individual characteristics of the
party appointees.
However, we found no evidence to argue that the party, as opposed to
individual politicians, will play a more prominent role in intra-party
mechanisms of patronage in democracies emerging from bureaucraticauthoritarian
communism. Instead, patterns that we observed seem to be
driven by party-related factors (i.e. organisational longevity) rather than the
regime-related factors. Even so, there might be an indirect eﬀect of regime
legacies on organisational characteristics of parties, and hence also on
patterns of patronage. Importantly, we found only weak support for placing
democracies with a national-accommodative type of ancien re´gime between
the other two post-communist types: Hungary, an example of a country that
has emerged from national-accommodative communism, displays patterns
of patronage that are quite similar to Bulgaria, especially in terms of the
scope and range of party appointments within the state. Thus, it could be
Party Patronage in Post-Communist Europe 917
that the particularly ‘‘accommodative’’ features of the ‘‘goulash communism’’
have, in fact, bred stronger preconditions for high level of state politicisation
than the original typology had suggested.
Crucially, however, the issue might not be the relatively high level of
Hungarian patronage, but rather a relatively low level of Bulgarian
politicisation of the state. As suggested in our analysis, patronage might
have been at least partly constrained by externally imposed conditions for
state reforms in Bulgaria. All Eastern European countries that we analysed
in this article have of course been subjected to external conditionality, most
notably from the European Union during the accession negotiations (e.g.
Dimitrova 2002, 2010; Meyer-Sahling 2004). However, as the front-runners
of reform at the time of EU accession, the Czech Republic and Hungary
were in a position to close their eyes to some of the EU demands. Not so
Bulgaria, the late reformer and second-wave EU candidate among the postcommunist
states. The country was not only under strong pressure from the
EU to reform its state and economy, but it had also been under ﬁnancial
supervision by the IMF for 10 years by the time of our research. Shefter
(1994) argued that institutional reforms preventing parties from raiding the
state for patronage purposes get implemented if a strong coalition for
bureaucratic autonomy emerges among the domestic political actors. Our
explanation for patronage patterns stressing institutional legacies would
suggest that such a coalition is unlikely to emerge in post-communist
Bulgaria. However, precisely because contemporary democratising countries
tend to be under far stronger external conditionality than new democracies
analysed by Shefter (see e.g. Levitsky and Way 2005), international
organisations should be seen as potentially as powerful source of state
reforms as any domestic actor.
Notes
1. We are grateful to Jan-Hinrik Meyer-Sahling and Krisztina Ja´ ger for making the data on
Hungary available to us prior to its publication.
2. Interestingly, Kitschelt and his co-authors also argue that the extent to which any of these
principles of the state develops under communism is to a large extent a reﬂection of patterns
of state formation and economic modernisation prior to the advent of communism.
3. There are numerous country-speciﬁc accounts concerning the nature and legacies of the
communist regimes that will support classiﬁcation of our cases. On Bulgaria, see e.g.
Kitschelt et al. (1995), Ganev (2001) and Georgiev (2008). On the Czech Republic see e.g.
Williams (1997) and Innes (2001); good general as well as Hungarian assessment can be
found in Kornai (1992).
4. While the MSZP–SZDSZ government was replaced by a minority MSZP government in
May 2008, the research reﬂects the practices of the coalition government.
5. The method is described in detail in Kopecky´ et al. (2008) and Kopecky´ et al. (2012).
6. The expert surveys were conducted during 2006–09. In Bulgaria and the Czech Republic,
the data were collected in 2006–07 and included over 80 respondents; in Hungary, the
survey was conducted in 2008 and included 40 respondents (see Meyer-Sahling and Ja´ ger
2012).
918 P. Kopecky´ and M. Spirova
7. The guiding idea for selecting the pool of experts was to avoid, as much as possible,
respondents who were either active politicians or themselves political appointees.
8. For a more detailed discussion on the diﬀerences between patronage, clientelism and
corruption see Piattoni (2001a) and Kopecky´ and Scherlis (2008).
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