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The cartel party and the state: Party-state linkages in European democracies

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 Party Politics
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The cartel party and the state: Party−state linkages in European democracies
Ingrid van Biezen and Petr Kopecký
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DOI: 10.1177/1354068813519961

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Article
Party Politics
1–13
The cartel party and the state: ª The Author(s) 2014
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democracies

Ingrid van Biezen

Leiden University, The Netherlands

Petr Kopecký
Leiden University, The Netherlands

Abstract
This article focuses on the nature and strength of the relationship between political parties and the state. Expanding on the
analytical framework we developed earlier (van Biezen and Kopecký, 2007), we identify three different dimensions of the
party–state linkage: the dependence of parties on the state, the management of parties by the state, and the capture of
the state by parties. We provide an updated cross-national empirical analysis of the relationship between political parties
and the state in contemporary European democracies, building on two recently developed datasets on party regulation and
party patronage. Our analysis underscores the considerable importance of the state for political parties in general, but also
highlights important differences between the older democracies, and the more recently established democracies that
emerged in the third wave of democratization. We show that the different dimensions of the party–state linkage do not
necessarily work in the same direction, which suggests that the assumption of a close relationship between parties and the
state ultimately undermining the democratic legitimacy of political parties requires some qualification.

Keywords
cartel party, party finance, party patronage, party regulation

Introduction growing importance of the state features prominently in the

original cartel party article and is illustrated by the word cloud
One of the key contentions of the Katz and Mair (1995) cartel
in Figure 1, which visually represents the word frequency of
party article holds that the process of organizational transfor-
the cartel party article (excluding the words ‘political party’
mation of European political parties is best characterized by
or ‘parties’). Indeed, Katz and Mair are to be credited for the
a weakening of the parties’ linkages with society and a conco-
significant readjustment in the scholarly debate on the per-
mitant intensification of their relationship with the state. One
ceived ‘decline of parties’, emphasizing that the strengthen-
part of this process of adaptation, i.e. the erosion of the relation-
ing of the party–state linkage has compensated for many of
ship between parties and society, has been relatively well docu- the parties’ societal weaknesses. As a result, the relationship
mented empirically and does not concern us here. Suffice it to
between political parties and the state has become more
say, this weakening of the parties’ social anchorage is evident
important in contemporary analyses of democracy and party
from a variety of indicators, which all point more or less in the
government (e.g. Dalton et al., 2011; Kopecký and Mair,
same direction, including the waning of party identification,
2003). In particular, in Mair’s publications the increased
the erosion of traditional cleavages, increasing partisan deal-
ignment, rising levels of electoral volatility, declining party
memberships, deteriorating relationships between parties and Paper submitted 2 August 2013; accepted for publication 19 December
collateral organizations, and so on (e.g. Dalton and Watten- 2013
berg, 2000; Inglehart, 1997; van Biezen et al., 2012). Corresponding author:
This article addresses the other side of the equation, i.e. Ingrid van Biezen, Leiden University, 2300 RB Leiden, The Netherlands.
the relationship between political parties and the state. The Email: i.c.van.biezen@fsw.leidenuniv.nl

Downloaded from ppq.sagepub.com at Universiteit Leiden \ LUMC on February 10, 2014

2 Party Politics
Figure 1. Word cloud cartel party article.
Source: Katz and Mair 1995.
relevance of the state as an organizational resource for parties
is not only of critical importance with regard to their own sur-
vival but also for the low levels of popular trust and legitimacy
as well as the uncertain future of party democracy (e.g. Mair,
1995, 2006).
In this article, we analyse the nature and intensity of the
relationship between parties and the state. In doing so, we start
from the analytical framework developed previously (van
Biezen and Kopecký, 2007), which underscores that the rela-
tionship between parties and the state is best conceived as
multi-faceted rather than uni-dimensional. More particularly,
we have identified three key dimensions of the party–state
linkage: (1) the dependence of parties on the state; (2) the
management of parties by the state; and (3) the capture of the
state by parties.1 The first element comprises the financial
dependence of parties on the state, which results from the dis-
tribution of direct public subsidies; the second entails the reg-
ulation of party activity, behaviour and organization by public
law; the third involves the extent of party patronage appoint-
ments within the state administration.
Below we provide an updated cross-national empirical anal-
ysis of the relationship between political parties and the state in
contemporary European democracies, building on two recently
developed datasets on party regulation and party patronage.2
These newly available data allow for a more comprehensive
and systematic analysis of the patterns of party–state linkages
than in the past. In what follows, we examine each of the three
dimensions of the party–state linkage in more detail. Our anal-
ysis underscores the considerable importance of the state for
political parties in general, but also highlights important differ-
ences that exist between the older democracies, on the one
hand, and the more recently established democracies of the
third and fourth waves of democratization, on the other.
The dependence of parties on the state –
Public funding
The importance of public funding has received considerable
attention since the cartel party article was first published, in
particular because the increasing dependence of parties on
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state subventions was given such ‘a pre-eminent position
as the key indicator of cartelization’ (Katz and Mair, 2009:
754; see also Mair, 1994). The underlying argument is well
known and can be summarized succinctly: the introduction
of public subsidies has made political parties increasingly
dependent on the state at the expense of their financial lin-
kages with society, such as membership contributions or
other forms of grassroots funding. In addition, state subven-
tions may serve to consolidate the status quo and therefore
contribute to the cartelization of the party system by penaliz-
ing smaller parties and making it difficult for newcomers to
enter the system. As the practice of state subsidies for par-
ties, or indeed party finances more generally, has now begun
to be relatively well documented and analysed (e.g. Koss,
2010; Nassmacher, 2010; Scarrow 2006), we can suffice in
this section to provide only a brief albeit systematic and
comprehensive overview. As our focus is on the parties,
rather than the party system, we concentrate on the availabil-
ity of direct subsidies to the national party organizations, as
well as the relative importance of state support provided to
the total party incomes.
State subsidies are now available to political parties in
nearly every European democracy. This can be seen from Fig-
ure 2, which reveals the years of direct public funding to party
organizations, beginning with Germany in 1959, followed by
Finland ten years later (1969) and concluding with the rela-
tively late introduction of state subventions in Latvia in
2010. The differences between long-established and more
recent democracies are not particularly large, except perhaps
that the only countries in which political parties (at the national
level) do not have access to regular public subsidies are three
older democracies – Malta, Switzerland and the UK – although
provides so-called policy development grants to parties with at
least two parliamentary seats. Another difference between old
and new democracies concerns the sequence of events, i.e. the
timing of the introduction of public subsidies vis-à-vis the
development and institutionalization of political parties and
democracy. In most of the newer democracies, public funding
was introduced at a relatively early stage of the democratiza-
tion process – already before the first democratic elections in
Spain (1977), Hungary (1989) and former Czechoslovakia
(1990) for instance, or shortly thereafter in many others. In the
older democracies, public funding was inevitably introduced at
a much later stage of democratic development. While the early
availability of state support may have aided the institutionaliza-
tion of the young and fragile party organizations in the newer
democracies, it may also have removed a key incentive for
the development of structural linkages with civil society;
this has served to consolidate the centralized top-down
structures that characterize many of the party organizations
in these young democracies (e.g. Lewis, 1996; van Biezen,
2003).
Nevertheless, public subsidies have become a widespread
phenomenon worldwide, in old and new democracies alike,
although they are perhaps more prominent in the latter. Katz
Biezen and Kopecký
Figure 2. Introduction of public funding.
Source: www.partylaw.leidenuniv.nl.
and Mair were thus right to note a growing availability of
state subventions, and they were also correct to anticipate
a further growth in the years that would follow (Katz and
Mair, 1995): since the cartel party article was first submitted,
public funding has been introduced in an additional eight
countries, bringing the number of European democracies
in which political parties are directly subsidized by the
state to 29 (out of 32). This increased availability of public
funding may in itself be taken as an indication of a grow-
ing financial dependence of parties on the state, although
the mere introduction of state subventions does not neces-
sarily imply that other financial resources have become
entirely irrelevant. Regardless of its actual relevance in
pecuniary terms, however, public funding may, as Katz
(2002: 115) has argued, ‘represent a fundamental change
in the character of the party, furthering its transformation
from a private association into a semi-public entity’.
In addition, a growing amount of evidence suggests
that state subventions are becoming so important that they
are crowding out other sources of party income. The most
interesting question then is how important these public
subsidies really are in relation to total party income. In our
previous contribution we alluded to the variations that
may exist between regions, between countries within a
particular region, and even between parties within one
country. We also noted the lack of suitable cross-
national data needed to explore the financial dependence
of parties on the state more systematically. As the subject
of party financing has acquired an increased importance
in recent years, no doubt in part as a consequence of the
arguments advanced by Katz and Mair, data have gradu-
ally become more widely available. Here, we use the
GRECO – the Group of States against Corruption estab-
lished by the Council of Europe to monitor member
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3
state compliance with the existing anti-corruption stan-
dards – evaluations from 2007 to 2011. These estimates,
however imprecise and despite ignoring within-country
variation, offer what is perhaps the best comparative
aggregate evidence currently available.3
Figure 3 displays the financial dependence on the state for
parties in the 23 countries for which GRECO evaluations
have been completed thus far, providing both the lowest and
highest values of their estimates. Being approximations, the
actual percentages should probably not be considered as
authoritative; what is important here is the overall picture.
The parties’ financial dependence on the state is indeed quite
staggering, especially given the relatively recent appearance
of public subsidies as a source of party income. In all countries
except Germany and The Netherlands, state subventions
amount to at least half of the total party income, while in the
majority of countries the state is responsible for two-thirds or
more of party income. Countries such as Belgium, Italy and
Spain are found at the high end of the spectrum, where state
subsidies are estimated to account for no less than 80 to 95
percent of the total party income. Although some of the older
democracies sit at the high end of the range and, conversely,
some newer democracies are at the low end, the dependence
on the state is notably higher in the younger democracies of
both Southern and Eastern Europe. On average, the state con-
tributes between an estimated 59.5 and 71.6 percent of the
total income of the parties in the older democracies, as
opposed to 68.8 to 78.4 percent in the newer democracies.
No comparable data exist to assess developments over
time, but from the scattered evidence available we know
that the relative importance of state funding in one group
of countries has remained more or less stable at a high
level, while in another it has increased significantly in
recent years. Spain is an example of the former. Having
4 Party Politics
Figure 3. Financial dependence on the state.
Source: GRECO, third evaluation round.
introduced public subsidies in the wake of the transition to
democracy, the levels of state support for the two main par-
ties PSOE and PP reached 75 to well over 90 percent of total
party income in the 1980s and 1990s (van Biezen, 2003). In
Finland, where public subsidies were introduced as early as
1969, the share of state subsidies reached 70 to nearly 85 per-
cent already in the 1970s and 1980s. Other countries have
seen a remarkable and rather sharp increase in the levels
of state support. In Denmark, for example, where state sub-
sidies were introduced only in 1986, parties have seen the
overall share of public income rise from around only 20 per-
cent in the late 1980s to an estimated 75 percent at present.
In Norway and Sweden, both with a relatively long-standing
history of public party funding, the figures have risen corre-
spondingly, from about 50 to 55 percent in the 1980s to an
estimated 70 to 80 percent today (early figures are extracted
from the contributions in Katz and Mair (1992); see also
Pierre et al. (2000)). Any cross-national variation that may
have existed one or two decades ago, therefore, has now
largely levelled out, as the importance of public subsidies
has continued to rise. The data and underlying trends convin-
cingly support the assertions of Katz and Mair, at least at the
level of the party organization. The introduction of public
subsidies has made political parties increasingly dependent
on the state, regardless of whether the democracy in question
is young or relatively long-standing.
The management of parties by the state –
Party regulation
Our second dimension is that of the management of polit-
ical parties by legal rules. Political parties have not only
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become more financially dependent on the state, they are
also increasingly managed by the state through public law
and the national constitution. As a result of considerable
growth in the scope and magnitude of regulations that are
specifically targeted at political parties, their activities,
behaviour and internal organizational structures have
become increasingly defined, prescribed or even pro-
scribed by state law. Indeed, parties have become subject
to laws that govern their external behaviour and activities
as well as their internal structures to such an extent that,
according to Katz (2002: 90), they have become ‘legiti-
mate objects of state regulation to a degree far exceeding
what would normally be acceptable for private associa-
tions in a liberal society’.
Despite the increase in state regulation of party activi-
ties, organization and behaviour, this phenomenon has
hitherto received relatively little systematic and compara-
tive scholarly attention, from political scientists or constitu-
tional lawyers (for notable exceptions, see Janda, 2005;
Müller and Sieberer, 2006; Karvonen, 2007). It has only
been in recent years that the empirical and normative
dimensions of this increased propensity of the state to inter-
vene in party politics are beginning to be systematically
(e.g. Casal Bértoa et al., forthcoming 2014; Casal Bértoa
and Spirova, 2013; van Biezen, 2012; van Biezen and Borz,
2012; van Biezen and Molenaar, 2012). More generally,
however, as Avnon (1995) observed nearly two decades
ago, the subject of party law remains a relatively neglected
aspect of research on political parties; discussion is limited
to passing references and lacks a comparative dimension.
In this section, we therefore discuss the nature and intensity
of this dimension of the party–state linkage in more detail.
Biezen and Kopecký
Figure 4. Chronology of party regulation and constitutionalization.
Source: www.partylaw.leidenuniv.nl
Katz and Mair (1995) highlight a number of aspects
regarding the importance of rules and regulations that
affect political parties. First, rules may provide parties with
access to public resources, in particular to state subsidies
and the media, which would otherwise be unavailable (Katz
and Mair, 1995: 15). Second, the rules are not exogenous to
the parties, but the parties themselves are responsible for
the creation of their own institutional environment: ‘it is the
parties, in their role as governors, who are ultimately
responsible for both the rules regarding state subventions
as well as for the amounts of money and resources that are
made available’ (Katz and Mair, 1995: 15; see also Katz
and Mair, 2009: 756). The existing regulatory framework
may contribute in various ways to cartelization, although
Katz and Mair appear to place primary emphasis on its pos-
sible impact on the party system: as the parties in power are
ultimately responsible for designing the rules of the game,
and as these rules provide them with privileged access to
state resources, parties on the margins of the system may
be effectively excluded. The state then becomes ‘an institu-
tionalized structure of support, sustaining insiders while
excluding outsiders’ (Katz and Mair, 1995: 16).
Katz and Mair do not explicitly address the ways in
which rules affect the cartelization of individual parties,
however. This may indeed be less immediately obvious,
inasmuch as the public regulation of parties in itself does
not necessarily imply that these parties become part of the
state. Its impact may manifest itself directly or indirectly in
important ways, however, as Mair observes in a subsequent
publication with Stefano Bartolini. If the internal and exter-
nal activities of parties are regulated by public law, and as
the rules governing parties become constitutional or admin-
istrative rules rather than internal party rules, the internal
organizational autonomy of the parties will weaken corre-
spondingly. Consequently, the public regulation of parties
may contribute to a redefinition of parties as public service
agencies (Bartolini and Mair, 2001). The nature of party
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5
regulation is thus an important source for investigation into
the character of modern democracy and the prevailing
underlying conceptions regarding democracy and the place
of political parties within it (cf. Persily and Cain, 2000).
In this section, we provide a quantitative and qualita-
tive assessment of the nature and intensity of party regu-
lation in post-war European democracies. First, focusing
on the number of laws and the amount of legal stipulation
targeted at political parties, the increased propensity of the
state to intervene in party politics is immediately obvious.
Figure 4 presents a chronology of party regulation and
constitutionalization in post-war Europe, with the top half
of the graph displaying the year in which political parties
were first incorporated into the national constitutions of each
country, and the bottom half the years in which a party law
was first adopted. Figure 4 clearly shows a progressive codi-
fication of political parties into public law, including the
national constitution and laws specifically designed to regu-
late political parties (hereafter: Party Laws).
The constitutions of Western liberal democracies have
traditionally paid little to no attention to the role of political
parties. The long-standing absence of political parties from
national constitutions might be explained by a variety of
factors. These include a historical sequence in which the
adoption of the constitution generally predated the appear-
ance of political parties, or a prevalence of particular nor-
mative conceptions of democracy, which have long been
incompatible with the phenomenon of political parties. This
rapidly changes in the aftermath of WWII, however. As Fig-
ure 4 demonstrates, waves of party constitutionalization
swept over the European continent in the second half of the
20th century and the beginning of the 21st. These waves
roughly correspond to those that Elster (1995) has identified
as waves of constitution-making and that Huntington
(1991) has observed for democratization processes (for a
more detailed discussion, see van Biezen, 2012). Although
the earliest case of party constitutionalization occurred in
6 Party Politics
Iceland in 1944, when the country became formally inde-
pendent from Danish rule, the Basic Law of the Federal
Republic of Germany in 1949 was the first in which parties
became the direct subject of constitutionalization. In addi-
tion, together with the Italian constitution of 1947, the Ger-
man Basic Law was one of the first constitutional texts that
attributed a positive and constructive role to parties within
the democratic system (Tsatsos, 2002). This represented a
novelty in the history of formal constitutional texts insofar
as it explicitly recognized the constitutional role and rele-
vance of political parties in the functioning of democratic
politics (Pelizzo, 2004).
Subsequent cases of party constitutionalization followed
in the 1950s and 1960s, with the break-up of the French and
British colonial empires resulting in the constitutionaliza-
tion of political parties in France, Cyprus and Malta. In the
1970s, parties were incorporated in each of the democracies
that emerged from the third wave of democratization in
Southern Europe, while the next and largest wave of party
constitutionalization followed from the establishment of
the newly independent democratic states in Central and
Eastern Europe. Finally, Finland, Switzerland and, most
recently, Luxembourg amended their constitutions in order
to include special references to the role and functions of
political parties. Of the 31 European democracies that pos-
sess a written constitution codified in one single text, 27
have enshrined the role and position of political parties.4
As a result of this ongoing and pervasive process of party
constitutionalization, only a handful of older European coun-
tries remain that do not make any reference to political par-
ties in their constitutions, i.e. Belgium, Denmark, Ireland,
and The Netherlands.5
This development suggest that in contemporary European
democracies, old and new, political parties are increasingly
accorded a formal constitutional status. In this sense, the
European pattern lags behind that of other regions in the
world, in particular Latin America, where the phenomenon
of party constitutionalization is older and more pervasive
(van Biezen and Kopecký, 2007; Zovatto, 2006). The
increased incidence of party constitutionalization in modern
democracies attests not only to changes in historical contexts
and empirical realities but also to new ideas and normative
beliefs regarding parties and democracy. It suggests that,
unlike in earlier periods, political parties today have become
a permanent reality as structures of political representation
and points to a more or less general acceptance of parties
as the necessary foundations of democratic politics. Further-
more, it suggests that conceptions of party democracy have
changed, whereby parties are no longer perceived as primar-
ily private associations but as predominantly public utilities
(van Biezen, 2004) or semi-state agencies (Katz and Mair,
1995), or at least as organizations whose public role has
become so important that it warrants their formal codifica-
tion as a permanent feature of the institutional architecture
of representative democracy.
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A large majority of European democracies has also
begun to adopt special Party Laws (see the bottom half of
Figure 4). The Federal Republic of Germany was the first
democratic country in Europe to adopt a Party Law, the
Parteiengesetz of 1967, which has served as a model for
many Party Laws on the continent, in particular for the
democracies of Southern and East-Central Europe (Müller
and Sieberer, 2006). Countries with a Party Law have
quickly proliferated to a total of 20 at present, although the
pattern has not been quite as pervasive as the process of
party constitutionalization. Overall, the distinction between
old and new democracies is quite pronounced; younger
democracies tend to be more inclined to adopt special Party
Laws than older democracies. In fact, Greece is the only
country among the newer democracies that has not adopted
a Party Law. That some of the older democracies remain
without a Party Law can in part be explained by the fact that
one of the main subjects of regulation – party funding – is
often laid down in special party finance regulation.6
In the process of Party Law promulgation it is possible
to detect a similar grouping of countries as that which
regards the phenomenon of party constitutionalization
(Casal Bértoa et al., forthcoming 2014), although in this
case the boundaries are not as neatly drawn. Clustering is
most clearly visible in the post-communist democracies.
Since the passing of the first Party Law in Hungary in
1989, no Eastern European democracy has remained unaf-
fected by this regulatory process. In most cases, as in Spain
and Portugal in the mid-1970s, the laws regulating political
parties were introduced in the years immediately following
the transition to democracy. The only exceptions are Serbia
and Latvia, where Party Laws were approved more than a
decade after the democratic transition, and indeed long
after their constitutions had codified the parties.
In the following paragraphs, a qualitative assessment is
made of the phenomenon of party regulation and constitu-
tionalization by focusing on the particular content of the
legal stipulations that apply to political parties. We concen-
trate on the content of the Party Laws (for a content analy-
sis of national constitutions, see van Biezen and Borz,
2012) and complement this analysis with an investigation
of the intensity of regulation.
Party Laws are enacted for various purposes and may
regulate a wide variety of aspects, ranging from the legal
status and definition of parties to issues regarding their
internal organization, mechanisms of candidate selection
and party finances (Katz, 2004; Karvonen, 2007). The law
may define what formally constitutes a political party, for
example, and determine who qualifies for ballot access
and who benefits from public resources such as state sub-
sidies and access to the media. The law may also exist to
regulate the type and form of activity in which parties may
engage and lay down the appropriate forms of party orga-
nization and behaviour. It may prescribe, for example, the
preferred organizational format of political parties, the
Biezen and Kopecký
Table 1. Areas of party regulation.
Area of regulation
Party finance
External oversight
Extra-parliamentary party
Secondary legislation
Activity / behaviour
Electoral party
Media access
Democratic principles
Identity / programme
Rights and freedoms
Party in parliament
Party in government
Source: www.partylaw.leidenuniv.nl
necessary mechanisms for the selection of public office-
holders, or prohibit the existence of parties that do not
endorse the fundamental principles of democracy. Finally,
the law may establish a monitoring and sanctioning
regime to supervise party activity and impose penalties for
violations of the law.
Table 1 demonstrates the results of our content analysis
of Party Laws. It displays the 12 different categories of
party regulation we have identified as well as the extent
to which these areas of party activity are subject to legisla-
tive rules.7 It happens that, although the possible range of
regulation is quite broad in principle, Party Laws mostly
apply to three main subjects: the regulation of party
finances, the monitoring of party activity, and the regula-
tion of the extra-parliamentary party organization.8 The last
category, whereby the state intervenes in the internal orga-
nizational structure of the party, is perhaps the most contro-
versial as it is likely to infringe upon the associational
freedoms of parties. Under this rubric, the law may regulate
the internal decision-making procedures of political parties,
define the powers and composition of party organs and pre-
scribe the frequency of their meetings, lay down internal
voting and election procedures, define the rights and duties
of party members, stipulate admission requirements for
party membership, proscribe the form of organizational
structure, and so on (van Biezen and Piccio, 2013). In some
countries, as we will see in the following section, the law is
quite detailed to the point of intruding upon the parties’
organizational autonomy. The expansion of prescriptive
party regulation is connected to the increasing amount of
attention that the regulatory framework directs towards the
establishment of mechanisms for external oversight of
party activity by special audit bodies or the general courts.
Finally, we show the variation between European
democracies in terms of the scope of party regulation. For
this purpose, Figure 5 demonstrates the country ranking on
our party regulation index (PRI). This index is based on the
range of party regulation and provides a standardized indi-
cation of the level of party regulation that is suitable for
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7
cross-national comparison (see van Biezen and Rashkova,
2012). Variation in the scope of regulation is considerable.
Magnitude
It ranges from countries such as Portugal, in which the law
31.6 regulates virtually all aspects of party activity, organization
30.7 and behaviour, to countries such as the UK, Norway and
22.6 Finland, where the scope is much more restricted (usually
5.6 limited to party registration and party finance). The older
2.8
democracies are clustered towards the lower end of the
1.6
1.3 spectrum; they regulate parties to a lesser extent and less
1.2 intensively than the newer democracies. Moreover, addi-
1.2 tional evidence suggests that party legislation on the whole
1.0 tends to be stricter in the newer democracies than in estab-
0.1 lished democracies; it includes restrictions of various types,
0.1 such as comprehensive bans on certain types of parties
(religious or ethnic, for example, in Bulgaria and Portugal),
a ban on party organization at the workplace (clearly a
legacy in post-communist democracies), or more thorough
sanction regimes (Casal Bértoa et al., forthcoming 2014).
Overall, these findings clearly show that the party–state
relationship has indeed intensified over time also as far as
their management by the state is concerned. In the follow-
ing paragraph, we turn to the question of whether the
strengthening of the party–state linkage on our first two
dimensions also implies that the state itself has progres-
sively become more partisan.
The capture of the state by parties – Party patronage
The third dimension of the party–state linkage relates to the
extent to which parties penetrate and control the state and
use public offices for the purposes of party organizational
building and advancement. Party capture of the state can
be conceptually and empirically studied in various ways,
but following recent trends in the literature (e.g. Ennser-
Jedenastik, 2013; Grzymala-Busse, 2007; O’Dwyer, 2006;
Scherlis, 2010) we focus on party patronage, i.e. on the allo-
cation of jobs in the public and semi-public sectors at the dis-
cretion of political parties.9 Empirically, party patronage
comprises partisan appointments to the civil service, over-
sight of the boards of public sector companies, management
of quangos or directorships of schools, universities and other
state institutions. This phenomenon has hitherto received
minimal attention from political scientists, and especially
from party scholars.10 This is regrettable considering that the
literature on party organizations makes frequent reference
to patronage as a valuable resource for party leaders to
build and maintain party organizations through the distri-
bution of selective incentives to party members and elites in
exchange for organizational loyalty (e.g. Panebianco, 1988;
Ware, 1996), while the literature on party government often
refers to patronage as the key indicator of the partyness of
government (e.g. Blondel, 2000, 2002). In this section we
therefore discuss party patronage in more detail.
Neither Katz and Mair in their seminal 1995 article, nor
Mair in most of his publications on parties and party
8 Party Politics
Figure 5. Index of party regulation.
Source: van Biezen and Rashkova 2012.
organizations, make any systematic theoretical predictions
linking party patronage to the emergence of the cartel party.
The exception is one of Mair’s latest collaborative volumes
(Kopecký et al., 2012), the results of which are the basis of
the empirical analysis of party patronage below. This said,
there are at least two important points to highlight that
appear from the literature on the emergence of the cartel
party. First, the extensive access to the state – a defining
feature of the cartel party era – is supposed to provide polit-
ical parties with a major source of patronage (see Katz and
Mair, 2009). That is, access, or privileged access, to the
state is thought to increase the supply of public jobs avail-
able to political parties for their own purposes, be they
organizational or other. Mair also argues that this increase
in supply is being widely utilized by (cartel) parties in
Europe, observing that ‘party patronage, exercised through
the state, is becoming an increasingly prevalent (or at least
noticeable) phenomenon’ (Mair, 1994: 10). Without expli-
citly addressing the question of party patronage, much of the
cartel party literature thus implies a general trend of increas-
ing politicization of the state in contemporary European
democracies, whereby parties appoint progressively more
partisans and party loyalists to public offices, for example
in order to recruit party activists (see e.g. Bolleyer, 2009)
or secure other publicly funded benefits.
Second, an even less explicitly addressed but obviously
implicit point in the publications on the cartel party relates
to the intra-party mechanisms of patronage appointments.
The ascendancy of the party in public office – a defining
feature of the cartel party organization – implies a significant
change of the internal distribution of patronage resources.
The internal organization of the cartel party is characterized
by the dominance of office-holding politicians (party in
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public office) over party members (party on the ground) and
central office employees (see Katz and Mair, 1995, 2002,
2009; Mair, 2004). It follows that in the cartel party it is the
party elite – the ministers, MPs and key party figures in pub-
lic life – who will be firmly in control of, and responsible for,
the allocation of most party appointments to state institu-
tions. Correspondingly, the central office and/or regional and
local organizations of a party will play a secondary role in
the allocation of patronage, particularly at the national level.
In this sense, cartel parties are pictured as elite-dominated
parties and the control of patronage resources should quite
clearly reflect this feature.
How do these two general expectations derived from the
literature on the cartel party fare in light of the recent evi-
dence? We offer both a quantitative and a qualitative
assessment of party patronage patterns. We start with the
Index of Party Patronage (IPP) which, based on data
extracted from expert surveys, provides a measure of the
pervasiveness of patronage appointments in 15 contempo-
rary European democracies. The IPP reports standardized
scores: a value of 1 indicates that patronage practices
approximate a full overlap of party and state, while a value
of 0 indicates the absence of party politicization of the
state. In order to interpret the actual values of the index
reported in the figure, it is useful to clarify the signification
of intermediate values: a value of approximately 0.65
means that political parties appoint in most institutions at
all levels of the administration; a value of approximately
0.4 means that parties appoint in most institutions at top
and middle levels; a value of 0.1 indicates that parties
appoint in a limited number of institutions and only at the
top level. In other words, IPP values of around 0.4 or higher
represent relatively pervasive patronage practices.
Biezen and Kopecký
Figure 6. Index of party patronage.
Source: Kopecký et al., 2012.
The first striking feature the data reveal is that, com-
pared to our findings on the previous two dimensions of the
party–state linkage, the variation among the European
countries is much larger. In Figure 6, the UK records the
lowest level of patronage, with an index reading of 0.09,
while Greece leads with a score of 0.62. The second impor-
tant finding, this time more congruous with the findings
on party financing and regulation, is that most of the
new democracies included in the study – the three post-
communist countries as well as Spain – are grouped
together at or slightly above the mean for Europe as a
whole. This finding is consistent with many predictions
on the predispositions of democracies that emerged during
the third wave of democratization of being relatively prone
to party patronage (e.g. Kopecký and Spirova, 2011;
O’Dwyer, 2006). The result is also fairly consistent with
the assertions of some of the party politics literature, which
argues that patterns of cartelization would be especially
pronounced in the young democracies (van Biezen,
2003). The most evident cases in which patronage is spe-
cifically used for party building are the more recently
democratized polities – Bulgaria, Portugal and Spain and,
to a lesser extent, the Czech Republic and Hungary.
The large variation in the pervasiveness of patronage
reported in Figure 6 is not particularly surprising. It is gen-
erally well established in the literature that European coun-
tries have historically developed quite distinct bureaucratic
traditions. Consequently, they differ in the malleability of
their state structures to succumb to predatory behaviour
of political parties and other political actors (e.g. Shefter,
1994). The ranking in Figure 6 is also largely consistent
with other, albeit less precise, estimates. This is especially
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9
true if the countries with the highest levels of party patron-
age are considered; Greece, Austria and Italy have long
been considered the patronage strongholds of Europe
(e.g. Müller, 2007; Piattoni, 2001).
Not all cases with extensive patronage in the past reveal
similarly high levels of patronage in the present, however,
as evidenced most notably by the cases of Iceland and, to a
lesser degree, Ireland. These two countries, which are often
considered patronage-ridden political systems (see, respec-
tively, Carty, 1981; Kristinsson, 1996), reveal IPP values
well below the European mean. A similar story applies to
a recently established democracy – Portugal (see Jalali and
Lisi, 2009). Importantly, there is probably no European
country where, on the basis of country accounts assembled
in Kopecký et al. (2012) it would be possible to make a
strong claim that partisan politicization of the state has
grown in the past two decades. The evidence is only tenta-
tive because there are no data comparable to those reported
by the IPP that would allow for cross-time analysis. There
is, nevertheless, a degree of consistency, which suggests
that party patronage in Europe has either been decreasing
or has remained comparable to levels observed in the past.
In addition, there is relatively consistent evidence suggest-
ing that the instances in which party patronage is systema-
tically used specifically for the purposes of party building,
such as for example jobs being given as public honour or
distributed as reward for services rendered to the party, are
less important than in the past. There are numerous expla-
nations as to why this might be the case (see, e.g., Kristins-
son, 2012). What matters here is that all these findings sit
rather uneasily with the general idea that an increasingly
close relationship between parties and the state will also
10
translate into, or be strongly manifested in, the higher levels
of partisan capture of the state. In contrast to both party
finance and party regulation, the available evidence sug-
gests that party patronage in European democracies is not
necessarily more pervasive than in the past.
Nonetheless, the evidence related to intra-party control
of patronage resources seems to be far more consistent with
the generalized expectations expressed in the cartel party lit-
erature. When one looks at the question of who within the
party is responsible for making appointments to public insti-
tutions, strong evidence suggests that the wider party – in
some organizational form – plays a relatively minor role (see
Kopecký et al., 2012). Instead, most appointments to public
institutions are awarded by individual ministers in a way that
is relatively unconstrained by their respective party organi-
zations. The allotment of key political positions – ministerial
posts or appointments to important foreign missions – is
likely to be discussed within the narrow party leadership,
i.e. the party in public office. Overall, however, political
appointments in contemporary Europe are probably better
characterized as the result of the individual efforts of minis-
ters rather than collective efforts of the party; the party cen-
tral offices, the congresses and their delegates, or party
members in general, certainly do not seem to play, or no lon-
ger play, any decisive role in party patronage.
To be sure, some cross-country and, most importantly,
cross-party variation in this respect still exists. In The Neth-
erlands, Hungary and Spain, for example, the party still
provides an identifiable filter in the process of patronage
whereby the central party organs keep track of public sector
vacancies and suggest potential candidates from within the
party network (see, respectively, van Thiel, 2012; Meyer-
Sahling and Jáger, 2012; Gómez and Verge, 2012). In Italy,
patronage has become highly personalized in recent years,
and public managers and other key figures appointed to
state institutions are no longer likely to be recruited through
parties; instead, they are nominated by individual political
actors who draw on personal networks embedded in the
professional world (see Di Mascio, 2012). In this case, it
seems that the party as such, except in its role as an organi-
zational base for use in national political competition,
almost disappears.
Italy, of course, may be an extreme case. However, the
observed patterns of party patronage seem to provide the
clearest support for some of the expectations expressed in
the cartel party literature, namely the notion of ‘stratarchy’
(Katz and Mair, 1995; see also Carty, 2004). Indeed, it is in
the Italian parties of the post-1992 party system collapse
that the most pronounced instances of stratarchy can be
observed, with sub-national notables offering the national
leaders an organizational base for national political compe-
tition in exchange for a lack of interference in their own
local operations and their use of local public resources.
Italy also underscores another more general trend among
European political parties – again very consistent with
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Party Politics
much of the cartel party literature – that personal networks
(of ministers) and other non-partisan settings, rather than
the party and the party apparatus, are becoming the primary
source of recruitment for political appointments. In other
words, not only is the (wider) party no longer in charge
of making decisions regarding who is appointed to key
positions in political life, the appointees themselves seem
to come from settings other than traditional party back-
grounds and environments.
Conclusions
Our findings on the three dimensions of party–state lin-
kages show that the relationship between political parties
and the state in European democracies has indeed become
stronger over time, at least with regard to their financial
dependence on the state and their management by the state.
Both the public subsidization and regulation of political
parties can be interpreted as two principal forms by which
the modern state intervenes in contemporary party politics.
The state intervenes in financial terms, providing parties
with direct and indirect subsidies, while at the same time
developing a regulatory framework in order to enforce the
proper management of the parties and to ensure that they
perform their unique democratic services effectively. It is
especially the legal codification of political parties, most
notably the constitutions and party laws as well as party
finance laws, that has strengthened the material and idea-
tional position of parties within the political system.
Although their legally codified position may imply that,
compared to other organizations, parties are bound by tigh-
ter restrictions, existing rules have also endowed them with
special privileges. The parties’ institutional relevance not
only justifies the existence of state support such as public
subsidies, but also effectively attributes them with an offi-
cial status as part of the state and explicit recognition of
their institutional importance for democracy. This clearly
resonates with the arguments advanced by Katz and Mair:
the growth of state subventions and extended party laws
lend parties an increasingly ‘official’ status within their
respective political systems.
However, our data on the third dimension of party–state
linkages – the capture of the state by the parties – do not
unequivocally support the idea of a stronger relationship
between parties and the state in contemporary Europe. Our
analysis suggests that the way parties internally distribute
patronage resources is highly elite and leadership-centred,
and hence consistent with the expectations expressed in the
cartel party literature. However, the extent of party patron-
age is not necessarily higher than in the past; it has even
decreased in some of the countries traditionally considered
to be patronage strongholds. Moreover, the systematic use
of party patronage to reward party supporters and activists
is also less prominent than in the past. These findings are
not particularly congruent with the general essence of the
Biezen and Kopecký
cartel party argument for which party patronage ought to
increase as a result of a closer party–state relationship.
Indeed, there might even be a certain paradox here. We
argued above that the increasingly legally codified position
of the parties may have given them special privileges
within the institutional apparatus of the state. The same
increase in the nature and intensity of party regulation,
however, may also mean that parties are bound by tighter
restrictions, including those that aim to combat corrupt
financial transactions or that curtail the scope of party polit-
ical involvement in the appointments to state institutions.
Indeed, there are numerous examples of recent institutional
reform – for example in the UK or in Iceland – that aim to
transfer the power of patronage from political parties and
their ministers to bureaucratic and non-political actors, thus
potentially weakening the privileged position of the parties.
This suggests that an increase of the party–state linkage on
one dimension might actually lead to its decrease on
another. If this is so, then one of Peter Mair’s principal con-
cerns, i.e. that a close relationship between parties and the
state will undermine the popular legitimacy of political par-
ties, and European democratic regimes may have to be
modified. In other words, it is not the party–state linkages
per se, but rather the extent to which this relationship
strengthens the privileged position of the (established) par-
ties within the system (cf. Mair, 1995) that is most likely to
have an adverse effect on their democratic legitimacy.
Acknowledgements
A first version of this paper was presented at the conference ‘Respon-
sive or Responsible Parties? Parties, Democracy, and Global Mar-
kets – A Conference in Honour of Peter Mair’, held at the EUI,
Florence, from 26-28 September 2012. We are thankful to the con-
ference participants for their valuable feedback. Financial support
from the European Research Council and the Dutch Organization for
Scientific Research is gratefully acknowledged.
Funding
Financial support from the European Research Council and The
Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research for parts of this
research is gratefully acknowledged.
Notes
1. The third dimension was referred to as ‘party rent-seeking
within the state’ in our previous publication.
2. Re-conceptualizing party democracy (http://www.partylaw.lei-
denuniv.nl) and Party patronage in contemporary democracies.
Available at: http://socialsciences.leiden.edu/politicalscience/
research/research-data/party-patronage.html.
3. See http://www.coe.int/t/dghl/monitoring/greco/evaluations/.
4. For the purpose of this analysis, ‘democracy’ has been oper-
ationalized as a country classified as ‘Free’ by Freedom
House at the end of 2010, with the exception of small states
with a population under 100,000.
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11
5. The UK has been omitted because it does not have a consti-
tution in the sense employed here.
6. The regulation of party finance is not part of our inquiry here.
It is of note that virtually all long-established democracies
that do not have a Party Law have adopted special party
finance legislation. The only exceptions are Ireland, Malta
and Switzerland, which do not have either. Many of the newer
democracies, in contrast, have adopted laws on political par-
ties and party finance.
7. For a discussion of the analytical framework, see van Biezen
and Borz (2012).
8. The increased regulation and monitoring of party finance is in
part a by-product of the introduction of state funding, which
inevitably went accompanied with the need for further regu-
lation. In that sense, our second dimension of the party–state
linkage is not entirely independent of the first.
9. Other phenomena frequently used to assess the extent of party
capture of the state are party clientelism and party corruption.
Party clientelism is generally seen as a form of linkage politics
involving the selective release of public (material) resources –
contracts, housing, subsidies, pork-barrel legislation, etc. – in
order to secure electoral support from individuals or from
selected sections of society (see Kitschelt, 2000). Party corrup-
tion is seen as an exchange of money for public decisions (Piat-
toni, 2001); for example when financial donations are given to
political parties in exchange for building contracts.
10. Indeed, under the terms of ‘politicization of the state’ or ‘poli-
ticization of bureaucracy’, party patronage has mostly been
studied by scholars of public administration (e.g. Peters and
Pierre, 2004).
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Author biographies
Ingrid van Biezen is Professor of Comparative Politics at Leiden
University. She has previously taught at the University of Birming-
ham and the Johns Hopkins University. She is a co-editor of Acta
Politica and the author of Political Parties in New Democracies
(Palgrave, 2003). She has written on comparative party politics,
political finance, party law and democratic theory. Her research has
been published in, among others, the British Journal of Political
Science, the European Journal of Political Research, Party Poli-
tics, Perspectives on Politics and West European Politics.
Petr Kopecký is a Professor of Political Science at Leiden Univer-
sity. He has previously taught at Sheffield University and he is a co-
editor of East European Politics. His current research focuses on
political parties, patronage politics and democratization. His
research has been published in, among others, the European Jour-
nal of Political Research, European Union Politics, Party Politics,
Political Studies and West European Politics. His most recent book
(co-edited) is Party Patronage and Party Government in European
Democracies (Oxford University Press, 2012).