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235–254

Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications London Los Angeles New Delhi Singapore
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THE STATE AND THE PARTIES

Public Funding, Public Regulation and Rent-Seeking
in Contemporary Democracies

Ingrid van Biezen and Petr Kopecký

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the relationship between political parties and the
state. We propose an analytical framework distinguishing between three
different dimensions of the party–state linkage: the dependence of
parties on the state, the management of parties by the state and the
control of the state by parties. We provide a cross-national empirical
analysis of the relationship between parties and the state in contem-
porary liberal democracies. Our analysis underscores the considerable
importance of the state for political parties in general. It also highlights
important differences between old and new democracies, as well as
important regional differences in terms of the nature of the relationship
between parties and the state in the recently established democracies.
We argue that these different types of linkages are highly relevant for
party system development and the nature of democracy.

KEY WORDS
clientelism
corruption
patronage
public funding
public

regulation

Introduction

LaPalombara and Weiner observe in the opening sentence of their seminal

volume that ‘[t]he political party is a creature of modern and modernizing
political systems’. In such systems, ‘the political party in one form or another
is omnipresent’ (LaPalombara and Weiner, 1966: 3). The political party, they
argue, is ‘a symbol of political modernity’; parties emerge ‘whenever the
activities of a political system reach a certain degree of complexity’ (pp. 3, 4).
They thus echo Schattschneider’s oft-quoted assertion (1942: 1) which
emphasizes the centrality of political parties for contemporary systems of
representative democracy.
1354-0688[DOI: 10.1177/1354068807073875]
 PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 1 3 ( 2 )

However, LaPalombara and Weiner maintain a particular notion of the

political party. When they speak of parties, they ‘do not mean those cliques,
clubs and small groups of notables that can be identified as antecedents of
the modern political party in most Western countries’, nor do they regard
as parties loosely knit groups with only a ‘limited and intermittent relation-
ship to local counterparts’(pp. 5, 6). Rather, their definition requires, among
others, continuity in organization and a manifest and permanent presence
at the local level. In their view, moreover, parties usually emerge as outgrowths
of society, often as a result of crisis situations, and mobilize support against
the perceived lack of legitimacy, the closed and exclusive nature of the politi-
cal regime, or as a challenge to its territorial integrity. In other words, what
LaPalombara and Weiner consider the prototype of the first modern form
of political party is today more commonly known as the mass party (p. 8).
Their study is thus reflective of the current paradigm that adopts the mass
party as the explicit point of reference.
The mass party is a model of party organization which is defined primarily,
if not exclusively, in terms of its linkages with civil society. As the mass party
has often exemplified the norm in terms of both representation and legiti-
macy, parties are consequently understood primarily in terms of their
relationship with society. However, a growing disengagement from conven-
tional politics has accentuated the weakening of the linkages between
parties and society. The passing of a golden age of the mass party has there-
fore given rise to debates on the ‘decline’ or ‘failure’ of parties. While parties
retain control over candidate recruitment and the organization of parlia-
ments and governments, they are losing relevance as vehicles of represen-
tation, instruments of mobilization and channels of interest articulation and
aggregation. As Bartolini and Mair (2001) argue, the representative (or
societal) functions of parties have declined while their procedural (or insti-
tutional) role is still intact and may even have increased. This reflects a
process of organizational transformation of European political parties which,
according to Katz and Mair (1995), signals a weakening of their linkages
with society and a concomitant intensification of their relationship with the
state. Parties have gradually and consistently moved away from civil society
towards the state, becoming ever more strongly entrenched within state
institutions.
This process is relatively well documented empirically, in particular
concerning the weakened linkages between parties and society. The precise
dimensions of the phenomenon need not concern us in great detail here;
suffice to say that the erosion of the social roots of parties can be seen from
a variety of indicators which all point in the same direction. These include
the weakening of party identifications, the erosion of traditional cleavages,
increasing partisan dealignment, rising levels of electoral volatility, rapidly
declining numbers of party members and the deterioration of the relationships
between parties and collateral organizations (e.g. Dalton and Wattenberg,
2000; Mair and van Biezen, 2001). Parties in the established European
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democracies are clearly losing relevance as instruments of elite–mass

linkages. In many of the more recently established democracies in Southern
and Eastern Europe, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa the social
anchoring of political parties has been fragile from the very outset of democ-
ratization (e.g. van Biezen, 2003; Mainwaring and Scully, 1995; Salih,
2003). Parties in these new democracies often originate within the state and
reach out only minimally towards society.
However, we know comparatively little about the relationship between
parties and the state, because this relationship has traditionally been
temporal, contingent and loose (Kopecký and Mair, 2003). To the extent
that parties were linked to the state, this relationship was confined to
government rather than the state tout court: parties recruited candidates for
public office, placed their avowed representatives in government positions
and sought influence in the state without necessarily becoming part of it.
Links with the state could be used by parties, but were not constitutive of
party. Both analytically and normatively, therefore, if not in empirical
practice, parties were at arm’s length from the state.
In other words, parties have traditionally been understood in terms of
their permanent linkage with society and their temporal linkage with the
state. Parties neither depended on the state for their resources and legiti-
macy nor were they managed or controlled by the state. Recent processes
of organization-building and organizational adaptation, however, have
reversed these patterns. To understand parties is no longer to understand
them in terms of their linkages with society, which have become increas-
ingly loose, contingent and temporal, but rather in terms of their relation-
ship with the state, which has assumed an increased importance both in
terms of legitimacy and organizational resources (see Katz and Mair, 1995,
2002). In other words, parties are now perhaps best understood in terms of
their temporal linkage with society and their more permanent linkage with
the state.
This article examines the linkage between political parties and the state
in contemporary democracies. We begin by proposing an analytical frame-
work that distinguishes between three different dimensions of this relation-
ship: the dependence of parties on the state, the management of parties by
the state and the control of the state by parties. In the second section, we
provide a cross-national empirical analysis of the relationship between
parties and the state in all contemporary liberal democracies. Our analysis
underscores the considerable importance of the state for political parties in
general. It also highlights important differences between old and new democ-
racies, as well as important regional differences in terms of the nature of the
relationship between parties and the state in the recently established democ-
racies. In the conclusion, we discuss the relevance of these different types of
linkages for party system development and the nature of democracy.

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An Analytical Framework

The relationship between parties and the state has thus far been analyzed
rather unsystematically and with insufficient conceptual clarity. Studies of
European political parties tend to take the increased relevance of public
subsidies for party financing and the increased public control of party
activity through public law as indicative of the strengthening linkage
between parties and the state. Other studies take practices of patronage,
clientelism and corruption to be part of the linkage between parties and the
state, which are often seen as typical attributes of more recently established
democracies, in particular those outside Europe. While both strands of
analysis have produced evidence of a strong and increasing relationship
between political parties and the state, in both old and new democracies,
these conclusions are predicated on the existence of very different types of
linkage.
We propose an analytical framework for the relationship between parties
and the state that allows for more integrated comparative analyses, includ-
ing both the older advanced industrial democracies and the more recently
established ones, and highlights important differences in the types of linkage
between parties and the state. We distinguish between three basic dimen-
sions of the party–state relationship: (a) the extent to which parties depend
on the state; (b) the extent to which parties are managed by the state; and
(c) the extent to which parties themselves control the state. Public financ-
ing of parties, public regulation of parties and party rent-seeking within the
state are indicators of each of these three dimensions, which we discuss in
greater detail below.

Public Funding of Political Parties

The public financing of political parties is our first indicator of the party–
state linkage. It addresses the extent to which parties depend on the state
for their organizational survival. Public funding for party organizations is
a relatively recent phenomenon. European political parties traditionally
depended on private contributions to finance their activities. However, the
introduction of state subventions in the post-war period constitutes a critical
turning point in the practice of party financing, and in party development
more generally. The increasing relevance of state subventions as a principal
resource for modern parties underlines the progressively strong interdepen-
dence between parties and the state. This is what prompted Katz and Mair
(1995) to advance the cartel party thesis, in which colluding parties become
agents of the state and depend on the resources of the state – such as public
subsidies – for their own survival.
The introduction of financial state support for parties does not imply that
other resources have become irrelevant. However, the evidence for the
established Western democracies shows a significant to critical dependence
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on state subventions. In the newer democratic regimes in Southern and East-

Central Europe, the state has assumed an even more crucial importance for
party financing (van Biezen, 2003; Lewis, 1998), particularly because public
funding is seen as a key mechanism for achieving equality of competition
and hence as an important instrument for the establishment of effective
multiparty democracy.
Because patterns of party financing have scarcely been the subject of
systematic cross-regional comparative analysis, our first objective is to
investigate empirically the extent to which public subsidies have spread
across the world as a means of party financing. If the expectations of wide-
spread financial dependence on the state hold true, we should find few
contemporary democracies without public subsidies to political parties,
regardless of whether they are old or new democracies, and regardless of
their particular geographical location.

Public Regulation of Political Parties

The public regulation of political parties is a second key dimension of the
party–state linkage. This includes the regulation of party activity, party
financing, organization or ideology through public law, including the consti-
tution. In recent years, as a result of increased state intervention, political
parties have been progressively incorporated into the public domain, so
much so that, according to Katz, party structures have become ‘legitimate
objects of state regulation to a degree far exceeding what would normally
be acceptable for private associations in a liberal society’(Katz, 2002: 90).
The increased involvement of the state in internal party affairs, with regu-
lation exercising a degree of control on party activity hitherto unprecedented
in liberal democracies, has contributed to a transformation of political parties
from voluntary private associations to a special type of public utility (van
Biezen, 2004). Public regulation of parties is thus part of a process by which
their activities become to a growing extent managed by the state.
One of the elements of the public regulation of political parties involves
the system of rules and regulations related to financing of political parties.
In this article, we use the existence of a regulatory system of party finances
as the first empirical indicator of the management of parties by the state.
The statutory control of party financing has obtained a strong stimulus with
the introduction of public funding, such that any system of financial state
support for political parties is likely to be accompanied by a framework
regulating party finances. Given the expectations concerning the widespread
availability of direct public funding across contemporary democracies,
therefore, we expect most countries also to have a regulatory system of
party finances.
Furthermore, the public regulation of party finances is often part of an
attempt to increase the transparency of party financing. This is especially
true in the many regions where democracy was established only recently,
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and where corruption is allegedly endemic. Even without the existence of

public subsidies, we thus expect that many new democracies will have a
body of public law to regulate party finances, if only because it is a standard
requirement of many international organizations and institutions that
support democratization.
In addition, public regulation includes what we call the constitutional-
ization of political parties. While political parties have long been neglected
in the constitutions of Western liberal democracies, their relevance for
democracy has become more widely acknowledged in constitutional terms
in the post-war period, beginning with the restoration of democracy in Italy
and Germany after World War II. This practice has since been followed in
many newer democracies, to the point that pluralism, political participation
and competition in contemporary democratic constitutions are often defined
almost exclusively in terms of party. In addition to the body of special laws
(e.g. Party Laws, electoral laws, Parliamentary Standing Orders), therefore,
the public management of political parties now often includes detailed regu-
lation of parties through the constitution. In that sense, the constitutional-
ization of parties constitutes a key element of the party–state relationship,
because it attests to a conception of democracy in which parties are seen as
necessary institutions, and signals that the state is assuming an increasing
role in the management of parties as an essential public good for democracy.
A strong and permanent linkage between the state and the parties in
modern democracies should thus be visible through a defining of the role
and value of political parties in constitutions. We expect party constitu-
tionalization to be especially common in the newer democracies, because
constitution-building formed a critical part of the democratization process
and the creation of democracy was often identified with the establishment
of free competitive multiparty elections. Parties were consequently attributed
a pivotal role and privileged position as the key instruments for the expression
of political pluralism and political participation.

Party Rent-Seeking
Our third dimension is party rent-seeking, which relates to the extent to
which parties penetrate and control the state and use public offices for their
own advantage, as opposed to the general public good. This dimension of
the party–state linkage is perhaps the most difficult to study, with the chal-
lenges being both empirical and conceptual. Not only are reliable cross-
national data scarcely available, but party colonization of the state involves
several related, albeit conceptually distinct, phenomena.
Party patronage and party clientelism, on the one hand, represent forms
of exchange relationships between patrons and clients in which state
resources are traded for political support (Müller, 2000; Piattoni, 2001;
Roninger, 2004). More specifically, party patronage involves the allocation
of jobs in public and semi-public positions such as, for example, the civil
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service, public sector companies, quangos and universities. Access to patron-

age typically provides party leaders with the means to build and maintain
party organizations through the distribution of selective incentives to party
supporters in exchange for organizational (party) loyalty. Party clientelism,
on the other hand, is a form of representation based on the selective release
of public (material) resources – contracts, housing, subsidies, pork-barrel
legislation, etc. – in order to secure electoral support from individuals or
selected sectors of society. Finally, corruption is perhaps the most notorious
form of rent-seeking. Corruption is different from party patronage and party
clientelism in that it involves the exchange of money for public decisions
(e.g. Heywood, 1997). In the context of party politics, the most common
forms of corruption are financial donations to political parties and politicians
in exchange for favorable decisions, such as building contracts or granting
of licenses. All three forms of party rent-seeking can potentially distort and
corrupt the ideal type of representative relationships in a democratic system
because they are based on particularistic rather than universalistic exchanges
and because they exploit the resources of the state for private rather than
public purposes.
In general, party rent-seeking is likely to exist in all democracies, new or
old. As a key resource for anchoring the party within the political system,
party patronage is often a valuable and effective strategy for dealing with
problems of party-building. Patronage might compensate for decaying and
underdeveloped organizational networks and the lack of a party presence
on the ground. More generally, however, we expect rent-seeking behavior
to be spread unevenly among contemporary democracies. We anticipate that
the success or failure of party rent-seeking is related to the institutional and
structural context in which political parties operate (also see Shefter, 1977).
As it should be stronger in the absence of effective checks on executive
power or mechanisms of bureaucratic accountability, we anticipate party
rent-seeking to be more prevalent in new democracies. Indeed, despite their
putatively strong control over society, the state structures recently emerging
from systems of authoritarian rule often lacked the autonomy to resist the
encroachment of political elites attempting to use the state for ‘private’
purposes (e.g. Grzymala-Busse and Jones Luong, 2002; Migdal, 1988). In
most of the longer established democracies of Europe, in contrast, the
historical processes of state-building generally limited the opportunities for
large-scale penetration of the state by political actors.

Empirical Analysis

Included in our analysis are all contemporary liberal democracies, which in

the context of this article was operationalized as all countries that were
considered ‘Free’ in 2004 according to the Freedom House data, provided
that their population was larger than one million, and that data for the
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indicators on at least one of our three dimensions were available. Overall,

our sample includes 52 liberal democracies, of which 22 are established
democracies and 30 are new democracies.1 To explore the possibility of
regional variation in the types of party–state linkage, we have divided the
new democracies into four geographical regions (Europe, Latin America and
Caribbean, Asia and Pacific and Africa).

Table 1. Relationship between parties and the state

Dependence Control of
on the state Management by the state the state
Availability System of Constitutional
of public regulation recognition Corruption
funding of party of political of political
for parties finances parties parties
Established
democracies
Australia Yes Yes Yes .–
Austria Yes Yes Yes 3.3
Belgium Yes Yes No .–
Canada Yes Yes No 3.8
Costa Rica Yes Yes Yes 4.5
Denmark Yes No No 2.6
Finland Yes Yes Yes 3.0
France Yes Yes Yes 4.2
Germany Yes Yes Yes 3.9
India No No No 4.6
Ireland Yes Yes No 3.9
Israel Yes Yes .–* 4.3
Italy Yes Yes Yes 4.2
Jamaica No No No .–
Japan Yes Yes No 4.3
Netherlands Yes Yes No 2.8
New Zealand No Yes .–* .–
Norway Yes No Yes 3.2
Sweden Yes No Yes .–
Switzerland No No Yes 3.2
United Kingdom Yes Yes .–* 3.4
United States No Yes No 3.6
Yes: 17 (77%) Yes: 16 (73%) Yes: 10 (53%)
Established No: 5 (23%) No: 6 (27%) No: 9 (47%) Mean: 3.7
democracies (N = 22) (N = 22) (N = 19) (N = 17)

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Table 1. Continued
Dependence Control of
on the state Management by the state the state
Availability System of Constitutional
of public regulation recognition Corruption
funding of party of political of political
for parties finances parties parties
New democracies
Europe
Bulgaria Yes Yes Yes 4.3
Croatia .– .– Yes 3.6
Czech Rep. Yes Yes Yes 3.9
Estonia Yes Yes Yes 3.5
Greece .– .– Yes 3.8
Hungary Yes Yes Yes .–
Latvia No No No 4.2
Lithuania Yes Yes Yes 4.2
Poland Yes Yes Yes 4.2
Portugal Yes Yes Yes 3.9
Romania Yes Yes Yes 4.2
Slovakia Yes No Yes .–
Spain Yes Yes Yes 3.8
Yes: 10 (91%) Yes: 9 (82%) Yes: 12 (92%)
New democracies No: 1 (9%) No: 2 (18%) No: 1 (8%) Mean: 4.0
in Europe (N = 11) (N = 11) (N = 13) (N = 11)
Latin America
and Caribbean
Argentina Yes Yes Yes 4.6
Brazil Yes Yes Yes 4.5
Chile No Yes Yes .–
Dominican Rep. Yes Yes Yes .–
El Salvador Yes No Yes .–
Mexico Yes Yes Yes 4.5
Panama Yes Yes Yes .–
Peru No Yes Yes 4.6
Uruguay Yes No Yes 4.3
New democracies Yes: 7 (78%) Yes: 7 (78%) Yes: 9 (100%)
in Latin America No: 2 (22%) No: 2 (22%) No: 0 (0%) Mean: 4.5
and Caribbean (N = 9) (N = 9) (N = 9) (N = 5)
Continued over

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Table 1. Continued
Dependence Control of
on the state Management by the state the state
Availability System of Constitutional
of public regulation recognition Corruption
funding of party of political of political
for parties finances parties parties
Asia and Pacific
Philippines .– .– Yes 4.1
Taiwan .– .– Yes 4.0
Thailand Yes Yes Yes .–
Yes: 1 (100%) Yes: 1 (100%) Yes: 3 (100%)
New democracies No: 0 (0%) No: 0 (0%) No: 0 (0%) Mean: 4.1
in Asia and Pacific (N = 1) (N = 1) (N = 3) (N = 2)
Africa
Benin Yes Yes Yes .–
Botswana No No .– .–
Ghana No Yes Yes 3.7
Lesotho No Yes Yes .–
Mali Yes Yes Yes .–
Mauritius No No Yes .–
Namibia Yes Yes Yes .–
Senegal No No Yes .–
South Africa Yes Yes Yes 3.8
Yes: 4 (44%) Yes: 6 (67%) Yes: 8 (100%)
New democracies No: 5 (56%) No: 3 (33%) No: 0 (0%) Mean: 3.8
in Africa (N = 9) (N = 9) (N = 8) (N = 2)
Yes: 22 (73%) Yes: 23 (77%) Yes: 32 (97%)
All new No: 8 (27%) No: 7 (23%) No: 1 (3%) Mean: 4.1
democracies (N = 30) (N = 30) (N = 33) (N = 20)
Yes: 39 (75%) Yes: 39 (75%) Yes: 42 (81%)
All liberal No: 13 (25%) No: 13 (25%) No: 10 (19%) Mean: 3.9
democracies (N = 52) (N = 52) (N = 52) (N = 37)
Notes: *Country has no written constitution.
Sources: 1. Classification of liberal democracies: Freedom House (2005) (www.freedomhouse.
org); 2. Party funding and regulation: IDEA (2003); 3. Constitutional recognition: country
constitutions (various sources); 4. Corruption of political parties: Transparency International,
TI Global Corruption Barometer (2004) (www.transparency.org/surveys).

Dependence of Parties on the State

The first column of Table 1 summarizes the availability of public funding for
political parties. We use this as an indicator of the dependence of parties on
the state. The data are taken from a comprehensive study of the International
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Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA, 2003) on the financ-
ing of political parties and election campaigns. The data in the first column
indicate whether political parties receive direct public funding. A negative
score was recorded for all countries without direct public subsidies, or where
such subsidies are available not to parties but to individual candidates (e.g.
the USA) or parliamentary party groups (e.g. Switzerland). All forms of
indirect state support, such as media access, special taxation rules, free
transport or postage, and so on, are excluded from our analysis.
These data show that, overall, in three-quarters of the liberal democracies
political parties now have access to direct public funding. Public subsidies
thus have indeed become a widespread phenomenon across the globe, in
both old and new democracies, which, given their relative novelty, is an indi-
cation of the increasing dependence of parties on the state. The data also
suggest that the difference between established and new democracies is
small. In 77 percent of the older democracies public funding is available to
parties (with India, Jamaica, New Zealand, Switzerland and the United States
as the only exceptions), against 73 percent of the new democracies. It is in
the new democracies in Europe that public funding is especially pervasive,
as state subventions are available to political parties in 91 percent of the
countries, Latvia being the only outlier of all countries in our sample.
The key question, of course, is how large the public subsidies are in relation
to the total party incomes. Available studies suggest that large differences
exist not only between regions, but also between countries within one region,
and even between parties within one country. In Eastern Europe, for example,
public funding in Bulgaria, Russia and the Ukraine is merely symbolic in
comparison to the resources parties obtain from private corporate donations,
while in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary and Estonia, the relative
importance of state money is much larger (see Kopecký, 2006). Among the
established democracies, for example, the UK provides only token amounts
of financial aid to parties, while parties in Germany, France and Israel
benefit from significant amounts of subsidies (Pinto-Duschinsky, 2002).
Unfortunately, suitable cross-national data to address this question are not
available.
Finally, it should be noted that Africa appears to be exceptional in many
respects. It is the only region where public funding is not available to politi-
cal parties in a majority (56 percent) of states. In addition, the combination
of ‘no state subventions’ and ‘no regulation of party finances’ occurs most
often in Africa, such as in the cases of Botswana, Mauritius and Senegal
(three such cases also exist among the established democracies, namely
India, Jamaica and Switzerland). These findings suggest that a particular
type of party–state linkage may be prevalent in Africa, which is one where
the sizeable benefits that parties amass from the state are almost solely
derived from patronage and clientelistic practices and corruption (Kopecký
and Mair, 2003; see also Cammack, 1998; van de Walle, 2003). Conse-
quently, state benefits are distributed highly unevenly among political parties,
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with only those who win elections in control of the state and commanding
the resources to sustain their political organizations. As Wallerstein observed
in his contribution to the LaPalombara and Weiner volume, ‘[i]n many
African states the theory of the precedence of the party over the state has
become official doctrine’ (Wallerstein, 1966: 206). We return to the import-
ance of this finding in the conclusion.

Management of Parties by the State

The second and third columns in Table 1 deal with the management of
parties by the state. Column two provides data on regulations and enforce-
ment rules related to financing of political parties. These data are also taken
from IDEA (2003) and indicate whether a system of regulation for party
financing exists. Excluded from the ‘Yes’ category are countries where regu-
lations for political finance focus on individual candidates as opposed to
parties (e.g. Botswana, Jamaica) or where a system of regulations does not
exist on the national level (e.g. Switzerland).
The findings are similar to those on the availability of public funding. A
large majority of countries have established a regulatory framework for the
financing of political parties, with few significant differences between old
and new democracies. Most countries that provide state support to parties
also have a system of regulation of party finances, with Denmark, Norway,
Sweden, Slovakia, El Salvador and Uruguay as the only exceptions. In a few
countries, regulations exist without a system of public funding for parties
(United States, Chile, Peru, Ghana and Lesotho). It is rare to find a country
that lacks both public funding to parties and the regulation of party finances.
India, Switzerland, Latvia, Jamaica, Botswana, Mauritius and Senegal are
the only cases in our sample that record ‘No’ on both dimensions, and
where parties are thus not strongly dependent on, or managed by, the state.
These findings add to our previous argument concerning the dependence of
the parties on the state, since a system of party rules and regulations is
closely related to the availability of public funding. They also give us a first
indication of the extent to which parties are managed by the state.
The third column describes the constitutional regulation of political
parties, providing further evidence on the extent to which parties are
managed by the state. As constitutions contain very different types of refer-
ences to political parties, we coded the constitutionalization of political
parties as positive only if the inclusion of parties could be interpreted as an
expression of their management by the state. Broadly speaking, a positive
score entails one of three possible alternatives:2 (1) the constitution defines
the democratic system itself, or electoral competition, in terms of political
parties. The constitution of the Czech Republic, for example, states that
‘[The] political system is based on free and voluntary formation of and free
competition between political parties . . .’ (Art. 5); (2) one or more pivotal
democratic institutions are defined such that they are necessarily comprised
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of, or could not function without, political parties. In Norway, for example,
‘[The] election of representatives of constituencies is based on proportional
representation and the seats are distributed among the political parties in
accordance with the following rules . . .’ (Art. 59); (3) the constitution regu-
lates political parties such that it prescribes or prohibits certain activities or
organizational characteristics. An example is the constitution of Ghana,
which states that ‘[E]very political party shall have a national character, and
membership shall not be based on ethnic, religious, regional or other
sectional divisions’ (Art. 55). Countries are assigned a negative score if their
constitutions lack any references to political parties (e.g. United States), or
if they mention parties but only with reference to citizens’ rights of expression
or political association. While this entails an important democratic entitle-
ment of citizens to exercise their political rights through parties, it is not
indicative of the management of the role of parties in the political system.
Table 1 indicates that over three-quarters of countries record a positive
score on the constitutionalization of parties. The difference between old and
new democracies is more pronounced than with our previous findings.
Nearly all of the recently established democracies have enshrined political
parties in their constitutions – the only outlier being Latvia – but this practice
is much less common in the established democracies, where only about half
the countries with a written constitution record a positive score. The lack
of constitutional recognition for parties in the established democracies is
probably a legacy of an historical conception of political parties as private
and voluntary associations. As such, there was no rationale for their
inclusion in the constitution. Some of the newer democracies, in contrast,
presumably prescribe the activities of political parties because of a legacy
of the recent past whereby parties, especially the Communist Parties in
Eastern Europe or ethnically based ones in Africa, were instrumental in the
establishment and maintenance of authoritarian rule. Indeed, many of the
post-communist constitutions follow what Janda (2005) calls a ‘prescription
model’ of party regulation, banning parties from advocating totalitarian
methods of political activity, for example, or dictating that they must be
separate from the state (see Kopecký, 2006).

Control of the State by Parties

All forms of rent-seeking are notoriously difficult to investigate empirically,
especially on a broad comparative basis. Party patronage and clientelism in
particular are often studied with the use of proxy measures (e.g. Grzymala-
Busse, 2003; O’Dwyer, 2004). To assess the degree of party rent-seeking,
and hence the degree to which parties can be seen to control the state, we
use cross-national survey data on the corruption of political parties. These
are taken from the Global Corruption Barometer (GCB) 2004 of Trans-
parency International (TI) and measure the extent to which different sectors
and institutions (including political parties, parliament, the judiciary, the
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 PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 1 3 ( 2 )

police, the business sector, the media, and so on) are perceived to be affected
by corruption. Here, we concentrate on the perceived corruption of politi-
cal parties.
We should emphasize that these data are different from TI’s widely used
Corruption Perception Index (CPI), which measures the perceived overall
level of corruption by country, including practices of corruption in areas
that are unrelated to the political system, such as the business sector. Our
measure, in contrast, focuses exclusively on the (perceived) corruption of
political parties. Although this allows us to examine only one particular
form of party rent-seeking within the state, excluding patronage and clien-
telism, we expect that our measure also relates to other forms of rent-
seeking, in particular party patronage, and thus can be interpreted more
broadly than as a strict reference to corruption.3
Column five of Table 1 reports the corruption score for political parties
on a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high) and shows that, with an overall mean of
3.9, political parties are seen as quite corrupt. The average score is only
slightly higher for the new democracies (4.1) compared to the older ones
(3.7). Indeed, even some of the longer established liberal democracies, such
as Austria, Belgium or Italy, have traditionally been characterized by high
levels of party rent-seeking. Although difficult to substantiate with our data,
the small difference might be due in part to increased party rent-seeking in
the established democracies in recent years, as parties try to further cement
their position within state institutions.
However, there is an important difference between established and new
democracies in the extent of party control of the state. As can be seen from
Figure 1, which graphically represents the corruption scores from Table 1,
the established democracies are relatively evenly spread along the continuum
of corruption, with Denmark as the least corrupt (2.6) and India as the most
corrupt (4.6). The new democracies, by contrast, tend to cluster around a
generally much higher level of corruption, with no country recording a score
lower than 3.5 (Estonia). These findings are also borne out by the standard
deviations. With a value of 0.60 for the older democracies against 0.32 for
the new democracies, the latter indicate a substantially higher level of clus-
tering. There are also important differences between regions. Latin America
and the Caribbean have the highest party control of the state, with an average
score of 4.5 out of 5. The average score for Africa (3.8) seems comparatively
low, but this is probably skewed by the limited number of cases (N = 2).
These findings may be indicative of a particular type of party–state relation-
ship which predominates in these societies, whereby strong ties between
parties and the state are based predominantly on rent-seeking practices.
Finally, the GCB shows that, when compared to other sectors and insti-
tutions, political parties are clearly perceived as the most corrupt of all insti-
tutions in an overwhelming majority of countries: in 28 out of 33 countries
(nearly 85 percent) parties rank as the most corrupt of all sectors and insti-
tutions (in 6 of which they rank equal first). There is little variation across
248
 VA N B I E Z E N & K O P E C K Ý: T H E S TAT E A N D T H E P A R T I E S

old democracies
new democracies
mean old democracies
mean new democracies

extreme corruption
4.60
4.50
4.30
Corruption of political parties

4.20
4.1
4.10
4.00
3.90
3.80
3.7
3.70
3.60
3.50
3.40
3.30
3.20
3.00
2.80
2.60
no corruption
Austria
Canada
Costa Rica
Denmark
Finland
France
Germany
India

Italy
mean old democracies
Ireland
Israel
Japan
Netherlands
Norway
Switzerland
United Kingdom
United States
Argentina
Brazil
Bulgaria
Croatia
Czech republic
Estonia
Ghana
Greece
Latvia
Lesotho
mean new democracies
Mexico
Peru
Philippines
Poland
Portugal
Romania
South Africa
Spain
Taiwan
Uruguay

Countries

Figure 1. Corruption of political parties

old/new democracies in this respect. This universally negative view of parties

as corrupt institutions may be the result of their close linkages with the state,
as some have argued (e.g. Mair, 2005), but this is difficult to ascertain with
the data we have to hand. However, the extremely high scores of parties on
corruption combined with the other findings we have presented give a solid
249
 PA RT Y P O L I T I C S 1 3 ( 2 )

basis on which to argue that contemporary political parties are (seen to be)
close to the institutions of the state and are (seen to be) not particularly
trustworthy institutions of democracy. We anticipate that these negative
perceptions of parties have a strong correlation with the high levels of
dissatisfaction with contemporary democracy.

Conclusions

Political parties and the state live together in close symbiosis in contempor-
ary democracies. We have analyzed the party–state relationship along three
different dimensions. First, the widespread availability of public subsidies to
political parties demonstrates that, despite their recent introduction, state
subventions have rapidly become a ubiquitous phenomenon in contempor-
ary democracies. Second, whereas the state in liberal democracies tradition-
ally stayed away from intervening in the internal affairs of parties, the
regulation of party activity and behavior through public law and the consti-
tution is much more common today, indicating that parties are more exten-
sively managed by the state than they were in the past. Longitudinal and
cross-national data on these dimensions are not available, at least not on the
global scale we have dealt with here. However, these findings support
existing research, which has drawn attention to the increasingly close linkage
between parties and the state, and suggest a near-universal trend in the
process of party transformation, by which parties in contemporary democ-
racies have become best understood as part of the state rather than the repre-
sentative agents of civil society. Finally, our analysis shows a pervasiveness
of practices of party rent-seeking, which suggests that parties are to a
considerable degree in control of the state and state resources. The combined
result of these phenomena is that the ‘reach’ of the party system, as Daalder
(1966) once put, increasingly permeates the institutions of the state.
Some of these findings are not new, although they have previously been
advanced on a less comparative basis and studied with less sophisticated
frameworks of analysis. Our analytical framework and the data we assem-
bled allow us to assess more precisely the multiple dimensions of the party–
state linkage that prevail in different political systems. We observed that
variation between old and new democracies is minimal with regard to the
high financial dependence of parties on the state. However, the public regu-
lation of parties, in particular through their constitutionalization, as well as
practices of party rent-seeking, appears more significant in recently estab-
lished democracies. This underscores the importance of the context and
period in which party–state relations are formed. The high incidence of party
constitutionalization is indicative of the era in which the constitutions of the
new democracies were (re)written, reflecting the contemporary conception
of parties as indispensable public institutions for representative democracy.
The high incidence of party rent-seeking is indicative of a state-building
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 VA N B I E Z E N & K O P E C K Ý: T H E S TAT E A N D T H E P A R T I E S

process in which state structures in modern democracies are less resistant

to colonization by political parties. Overall, parties in the newer democra-
cies are closely linked to the state on all three dimensions we identified, that
is, they are highly dependent on the state, they are to a large extent managed
by the state, while they also have control of key resources of the state. There
are, however, important regional variations.
In Africa, for example, the predominant type of party–state linkage seems
to be one whereby rent-seeking is the key route for parties and elites to
obtain benefits from the state. In contrast with most other countries, African
countries generally lack state subsidies to political parties.4 Access to the
resources of the state thus tends to be exclusive, as it is usually confined to
those parties that are part of the political executive. As a consequence, state
benefits are distributed highly unequally among political parties, for only
those who win elections control the state, and only those who control the
state command the resources necessary to sustain and expand their political
organizations. The winners thus win twice: in addition to their privileged
position of executive power, incumbents enjoy huge material advantages over
the opposition. In many African countries, this form of party–state linkage
provides the underpinning of systems with dominant parties, with little or
no turnover of executive power and with sometimes questionable standards
of democratic process.
In most of the established democracies in Western Europe, by contrast,
access to state resources is comparatively inclusive, based to an important
extent on public subventions for which all parties are eligible (provided that
they meet certain minimum thresholds). In other words, state resources are
not normally limited to the parties in power but extended also to opposition
parties. Because the benefits that can be accrued from the state are shared
more equitably in these systems, party maintenance and survival does not
depend on occupying positions of public office. However, one could wonder
if the relatively high, and possibly increasing, incidence of party rent-seeking
in the established democracies might indicate a tendency toward a greater
degree of majoritarianism.
Finally, in the new European and Latin American democracies the wide-
spread availability of state subsidies goes together with both high levels of
state management of parties and high levels of rent-seeking. These cases are
interesting because the introduction of state financing and the regulation of
parties often sought to prevent (post-communist Europe) or counteract (Latin
America) party rent-seeking within the state. Our data suggest that public
funding and regulation of parties are unlikely to achieve this on their own
accord. However, this form of party–state linkage may underpin more durable
democratic party systems. While winning elections and occupying positions
of executive power will still provide parties with attractive tangible benefits,
these systems may be less conducive to the downward spiral of underdevel-
opment of opposition parties that is typical for African countries, and thus
better safeguard the competitiveness and pluralism of the democratic process.
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It should be clear that these differences in the precise form of the relation-
ship between parties and the state matter considerably, from the point of
view of party system development if not the quality of democracy. In any
democratic polity, the state offers numerous long- and short-term benefits
and resources to political parties. These may compensate for the weakness
of parties on the ground and may allow them further to isolate themselves
from society. The state and the control of state resources can also be key
instruments of power politics. In that sense, the precise form of party–state
linkages is indicative of how and with what potential consequences power
struggles are played out in different contexts.

Notes

This article was first presented at the conference on Political Parties and Political
Development, National Democratic Institute, Washington DC, in August 2005. We
thank the conference participants for their insightful comments, Russell Dalton and
Ian McAllister for their helpful suggestions, and Yvette Peters for her valuable research
assistance. We also thank two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their comments.

1 In principle, we consider all countries that started to democratize during or after

1974 as new democracies, except for Botswana, where regime change occurred
in 1969, which we added to the group of new democracies. We consider Costa
Rica (1949), India (1950) and Jamaica (1959) as established democracies, along
with Japan (1952). These countries are part of the second (short) wave of democ-
ratization, between 1943 and 1962 (see Huntington, 1991).
2 More detailed information on the coding of country constitutions is available
from the authors.
3 Manow (2002), for example, argues that there is a strong correlation between
patterns of patronage and the corruption scores as measured by the CPI.
4 Many poorer countries in Africa have abolished state support for parties, even
where it de jure exists (Pinto-Duschinsky, 2002).

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INGRID VAN BIEZEN is a Reader in Comparative Politics at the University of

Birmingham. She has taught at the University of Leiden and the Johns Hopkins
University, and has held Visiting Fellowships at Yale University and the University
of California, Irvine. She is the author of Political Parties in New Democracies
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, shortlisted for the Stein Rokkan prize) and the co-editor
(with Richard S. Katz) of the Political Data Yearbook of the European Journal of
Political Research. She has published various articles on political finance, party
organization and party membership in journals such as West European Politics, Party
Politics, Mediterranean Politics and the European Journal of Political Research.
ADDRESS: Department of Political Science & International Studies, European
Research Institute, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT,
UK. [e-mail: i.c.vanbiezen@bham.ac.uk]

PETR KOPECKÝ is a Research Fellow of the Netherlands Organization for Scien-

tific Research (NWO) based at Leiden University. His current research focuses on
party patronage. He is the author of Parliaments in the Czech and Slovak Republics:
Party Competition and Parliamentary Institutionalization (Ashgate, 2001) and
(co)editor of Uncivil Society? Contentious Politics in Eastern Europe (Routledge,
2003) and Political Parties and the State in Post-Communist Europe (Routledge,
2007).
ADDRESS: Department of Political Science, University of Leiden, Wassenaarseweg
52, 2333AK Leiden, The Netherlands. [e-mail: kopecky@fsw.leidenuniv.nl]

Paper submitted 7 January 2006; accepted for publication 24 June 2006.

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