Party Patronage and Party Government in European Democracies (review)

Abstract

SEER, 91, 4, OCTOBER 2013 934 Describing the devastating Georgian-Abkhazian war as ‘clashes that erupted in 1992–3’ (p. 218) is an insult to the thousands who perished therein, whilst the charge that ‘weak secessionist states like Abkhazia and South Ossetia will exacerbate immigration on its [EU’s] borders and strengthen drug and other criminal networks’ (p. 245) is wholly unsubstantiated. As for South Ossetia, Gamsakhurdia’s provocations began the blood-letting (1990–91), Saak’ashvili later resorting to armed intervention (2004). As for the 2008 August war, Jones dismisses the EU Commission’s report, which found no evidence of Russian military encroachment to justify Saak’ashvili’s order to attack, as ‘anodyne’ (p. 242), upbraids the EU for letting Saak’ashvili down (p. 254) and even defends his actions that fateful month (p. 242). ‘[I]nternational finance organizations’ are rightly castigated for superficially equating ‘Tbilisi with Georgia and post-communism with modernity’, while ‘Westerneconomicadvice’evidently‘contributedtothedestructionofGeorgia’s economic base’ (p. 111), and ‘misguided Western reforms’ are criticized for helping ‘create an overcentralized executive’ (p. 271). But, whereas I readily join Jones in berating Western governments for having ‘neglected Georgia’s conflicts’ (p. 245), I have a different ‘neglect’ in mind. For me, the West precipitately recognized Georgia in 1992 and thus gave Tbilisi carte blanche to act in (actually self-defeating) defence of Georgia’s territorial integrity, insouciantly failing to apply any restraints regarding interethnic relations. In a decision calculated to annoy language-specialists, Jones elected not to mark Georgian’s glottalic consonants (achievable by mere addition of the apostrophe). No normal bibliography is provided for readers to see at a glance the range of authors/works cited. No theoretical model is constructed to account for the Georgian experience, though the work is replete with mots justes from several socio-politologists and/or economists deemed applicable to relevant phenomena. SOAS, University of London George Hewitt Kopecký, Petr; Mair, Peter and Spirova, Maria (eds). Party Patronage and Party Government in European Democracies. Comparative Politics. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012. xvi + 415 pp. Figures. Tables. Notes. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. £60.00: $110.00. This book offers a rare example of research originating with work on new democracies that has been extended to established democratic systems. The book presents case studies of party patronage in fifteen European democracies — three from Central and Eastern Europe, twelve from Western Europe — but uses a conceptual and analytical framework developed by Kopecký, Spirova and their colleagues for the comparative study of new democracies in Europe, Latin America and Africa. REVIEWS 935 Party patronage, Kopecký, Spirova and Mair argue, takes broadly two forms: classical clientelism in which a party trades public office — or the resources stemming from it — with individuals or social groups in exchange for electoral support, and party use of patronage on a more limited scale as an organization-building resource to reward supporters and secure control over key state agencies. The editors accept that forms of classical clientelism — and, in particular, the mass patron-client networks historically characteristic of parties in less developed,ruralsocieties—areirreversiblydeclining. Historicaldevelopments such as the rise of programmatic class-based politics and mass organization, the decline of local, rural economies and the rise of more individualized, meritocratic societies with higher social mobility have cumulatively eliminated the social bases of traditional clientelism in almost all European societies. However Kopecký, Spirova and Mair suggest there are grounds to expect that party patronage in the second, narrower, organization-related sense will increase even in advanced European democracies: parties’ organizational presence in civil society has withered, leaving them with an ever smaller pool of well qualified, ideologically committed members to draw on, while a general decline in polarization between parties has made party ideology increasingly ineffective as means of securing loyalty. Moreover, they suggest, the displacement of traditional forms of government based on party direction of the state by more networked patterns of governance necessitates the development of party networks, which — as in many areas of professional activities — can be most easily co-ordinated by through patronage. It follows that, although often conflated with corruption by both academic and journalistic writers, partisan appointments can be entirely open and legal aspect of the democratic...