Patronage as Party Resource
- Selective Incentives and the Generation of Organizational Support -
Nicole Bolleyer
European University Institute
Via dei Roccettini 9
50016 San Domenico (FI), Italy
Nicole.Bolleyer@iue.it
Paper Prepared for the 3rd ECPR Joint Session in Nicosia, Cyprus
25-30 April 2006
Workshop: Political Parties and Patronage
Directors: Petr Kopecký & Peter Mair
Draft Version – Please do not cite without the permission of the author!
Recent research on party democracy argues that parties have begun to establish tight linkages
to the state, while functioning less and less as voluntary associations for citizen
representation. The increase of patronage observed in several European systems can be read
as one symptom of this overall phenomenon. In order to conceptualize patronage as a resource
which parties use for their organizational self-maintenance in modern party democracy, the
paper puts forward the following arguments:
The readiness of parties to use patronage needs to be understood as a resort to one type of
selective incentive to assure individual loyalty where the capacity to do so through collective
incentives declines due to several mutually reinforcing processes. Since political engagement
has become a matter of ‘choice’ more than of ‘belonging’, parties need to assure loyalty on
the basis of selective benefits. Citizens who are politically active for ideational reasons
increasingly use channels other than parties which has implications for the characteristics of
newly incoming party members, a process supported by the changing recruitment styles of
party elites. While as a consequence of vote-maximizing strategies party-voter linkages
become less, party-member linkages become more particularistic leading to a growing
demand for party patronage.
An increasing demand is one part of the story, the problems to handle patronage as a resource
to satisfy these demands is another. The second part of the paper looks at the defining features
of patronage exchanges and the challenges springing from them when patronage goods are
used to maintain organizational support and leads to the formulation of a set of hypotheses on
how the use of patronage might develop over time and might impact on party organization.
1
I. Introduction: Membership Decline and the Rise of Party Patronage
In recent party research, the role of membership for the maintenance of parties in Western
democracy is the subject of an on-going debate. More and more frequently, works on party
change point to the decreasing need and the increasing costs for party leaders in modern
democracies of recruiting and retaining members (Blyth/Katz 2005; Katz/Mair 1995; Mair
1997). Other studies on party membership draw a more mixed picture. Scarrow (1996), for
instance, points out that the motives of party leaders to maintain a stable membership might
have changed, away from the provision of funds towards the legitimation of their party as an
organization, while refusing the claim that membership has become a liability rational party
elites will try to free themselves from. In Germany and Great Britain Scarrow observes
changes in the mode of recruitment, while leaders still try to maintain a membership basis.
The findings on the development of party membership, in contrast, speak a fairly clear
language. There is an observable trend of membership decline across Western democracies
over time (Mair 1997; Mair/van Biezen 2001). Furthermore, studies on party membership
have shown that not only membership decreases in number but changes qualitatively. On the
one hand, members age due to the considerable recruitment problems among young citizens,
on the other, the members remaining in the party become less active (Cross/Young 2004;
Gallagher/Marsh 2004; Hooghe et al 2004; Pedersen et al. 2004; Salgie/Heidar 2004;
Sundberg 2003).
The consequence that the bulk of passive members shrinks and with it the amount of
membership fees they contribute is problematic. Still, parties seem to be able to cope with
this development by acquiring access to state funding (Katz/Mair 1995; van Biezen 2000;
2001; 2004; Sundberg 2003). At the same time, however, the number of active members
shrinks as well - those core members who are essential to maintain the ‘party on the ground’
as an organization (Panebianco 1988: 26). As Seyd and Whiteley point out, in bad electoral
times the existence of a core of supporters is essential to a party’s survival and recovery
(2004: 360). Furthermore, the goal of organizational self-maintenance presupposes the
smooth replacement of leaders and candidates over time again presupposing that a pool of
office aspirants is recruited in the first place. To control this process is not only in the interest
of the party elites who want to maintain their own position in the party machinery but also
adds to the outside credibility of parties able to deliver programs, policies and personnel in the
long run. Thus party elites need an organization which helps to channel, monitor and preselect potential successors and keeps them waiting without threatening the current leadership.
2
To do so, party workers (of which future party elites are a part) are needed to uphold the basic
organizational infrastructure.
To motivate them to continuous work quite naturally creates costs for the party
leadership. However, it is argued that these costs are still lower than the costs created by, to
mention the most radical solution, the introduction of primaries which would ‘externalize’ the
selection problem and reduce parties’ capacity to steer recruitment considerably. This is the
case first, because party elites would give away one core resource, the control over candidate
selection and with it an important instrument to discipline actual party MPs and party
members hoping for future candidacy. This would lead to a considerable loss of control when
coordinating
government
and
parliamentary
MPs.
Second,
with
the
increasing
professionalization of politics, the expectations towards candidates in terms of skills as well
as the burden of political life are increasing. As one consequence, office aspirants are
expected to rise slowly through the ranks to acquire professional experience (King 1981: 277)
which functions as a mechanism of ex ante screening of candidates used by party leaders
(Müller 2000a). Again, the advantage of such intra-organizational career paths is the one of
control. Potential candidates have to move up the internal hierarchy before having access to
valuable positions in terms of money and status, while current elites profit from aspirants’
long-term engagement and gather information about the latter’s qualification.
Starting from the claim that modern party elites still need the ‘party on the ground’ - although
rather a ‘core nucleus’ of qualified activists than a ‘broad mass’ of passive members - this
paper discusses, first, the growing challenges for party elites to reconcile electoral and
organizational goals and, second, in how far patronage as selective incentive can help to cope
with these challenges. Selective in contrast to collective incentives gain value because they
are attributed to only a sub-set of members and are not accessible through simply entering the
organization (Wilson 1971: ch. 6). Based on this very basic distinction, the paper argues that
while abandoning the ‘party on the ground’ as Blyth and Katz (2005) hypothesize, is not a
feasible option, the capacity to maintain it through collective goods declines. To understand
this development, the arguments pointing at leaders’ increasing efforts to gain programmatic
flexibility for vote-maximizing purposes is only one side of the coin (Mair 1997), the
increasing difficulties to attract members through collective benefits due to societal
transformation is the other. As electoral and organizational challenges are intertwined, so are
parties’ responses to them. To the extent that political leaders become ‘non-discriminating’
service providers for the electorate as a whole, they weaken their capacity to provide
3
collective benefits to followers. While parties’ relations to voters and to members (both
belonging to the same social segment) were complementary in the past, more recently,
linkages to these two groups diversify: While party-voter linkages become less, party-member
linkages become more particularistic. With this, strategies to maintain both are increasingly
difficult to reconcile. Arguing that material incentives – in contrast to purposive incentives provide the greatest flexibility to set and to seek organizational goals as well as to choose the
instruments to achieve them (Schlesinger 1965: 768), an increasing relevance of the former is
a likely outcome. As Sundberg showed in his analysis of party organization in Scandinavia,
while mass party membership has eroded, parties invest more material resources to educate
and reward their active membership holding public office than ever before (2003: 149-50).
Simultaneously, the capacity to generate a stable ideological affiliation wanes. Hence, while
the loss of passive party members might have a limited impact on parties as organizations due
to increasing affiliation to the state, they get under pressure on a ‘smaller scale’ in having to
compensate for the declining impact of purposive incentives through selective incentives to
those core members essential to maintain the party infrastructure. This problem is all the more
essential given that programmatic appeals more often induce activists to enter a particular
party and become active than help to sustain this activity and take over additional burdens
(Conway/Feigert 1965: 1172).
This said, party elites’ strategies to provide selective incentives to their core members
and the trade-offs involved in doing so when simultaneously providing different types of
incentives (collective- selective; material-immaterial) become a core issue for the debate of
party change and transformation as triggered by the debate around the cartel party model
(Katz/Mair 1995; see for a critique Kitschelt 2000a). Since the bonds linking members
constitutes important variables for assessing a party’s interrelationship with its environment
(Crotty 1970: 276), it is worthwhile to approach this debate from the side of party-member
relations since elites’ use of particular incentives and member motivations are naturally
linked.
The use of patronage represents one strategy available to parties to satisfy the demands for
selective incentives. Empirically, the increase in party patronage observed in several
European democracies of fairly heterogenous institutional make-up (Blondel 2002; Müller
2000b) can be read as one symptom of these more fundamental transformations of Western
democracies. While party elites’ resort to patronage - along with their increasing dependency
on state funding or their deliberate dissociation from affiliated organizations - has been
4
identified as one indication of party change (Mair 1997: 142-3), its intra-organizational
triggers, its interplay with party elites’ electoral strategies and its societal roots have not been
spelled out systematically.
Consequently, while empirical work on patronage shows that patronage is used to
compensate party activists (Müller 2000b: 157), this paper goes one step back and discusses
the organizational implications of the changing supply of members as a result of societal
changes on the one hand and due to party elites’ changing relations to voters and members on
the other. Further, it asks in what way the professionalization of parties and the demands of
the electoral game changes leaders’ demands for members of a particular type shifting focus
from ideologically motivated activists directed towards purposive benefits to pragmatic
professionals directed towards selective ones. The main argument of this first major section is
that these trends are complementary in reinforcing the pressure on party elites to provide
selective benefits.
While patronage itself represents a rather neglected topic in party theory, it evidently
touches upon very old question of how organizations cannot only be formed but maintained
based on the provision of different sets of incentives (Olson 1965; Wilson 1973; Panebianco
1988). At the same time, the impressive literature on party membership, organization and
change allows to embed this specific phenomenon into a wider context. This is all the more
necessary since existing approaches on party patronage tend to conceptualize patronage as the
use of government resources to obtain votes or to maintain support in general (Key 1936;
Shefter 1977; 1994; Warner 1997; Manow 2002) irrespective of the very different roles of
active and passive members, of voters and supporters. By focusing instead on the increasingly
demanding and therefore less stable relationship between core members and party elites in
face of changing party-voter relations, it becomes comprehensible why party elites resort
more frequently to patronage as an instrument to assure intra-organizational loyalty.
On the basis of this general claim, in a second major section the challenges of using patronage
are discussed. There are three conditions to efficiently use patronage as resource or, more
precisely, as selective incentive for stimulating membership activity. These conditions are the
access to patronage resources that cannot be provided exclusively within organizational
boundaries, the control of patronage resources which refers to the control over the
distribution of spoils and finally the feedback of using patronage to be expected from voters
and from non-rewarded or ideologically motivated members. All three problem dimensions
refer to organizational challenges within parties and to the institutional context in which they
5
try to pursue their goals since the type of incentives used intra-organizationally has
implications not only for the internal functioning of the party itself but for its relationship to
the political system and of society of which it is part (Conway/Feigart 1968: 1060). Since
existing approaches on party patronage centre around the question of access and of feedback,
the second section of the paper focuses on the problem of control over distribution.
Analytically speaking, in the first part the incentives for parties as organizations to
provide selective benefits to members will be discussed as a response to societal changes
which impact upon parties in Western industrial democracies similarly. It delivers arguments
why party elites should increasingly resort to selective incentives such as patronage in party
democracy in general. In the second part, we move down to the meso and micro level and
shift from the implications of systemic factors to the implications of patronage exchanges
themselves when trying to generate member support. Ironically, while the first part stresses
the need for more selective benefits to generate organizational stability, the second part
stresses the difficulties to do so through patronage whenever parties do not deliberatively
counteract the tendencies of patronage exchanges prone to generate instability in member
support in the long run. Finally, the last part returns to the system level where the paper
started out. It makes a first step towards a necessary specification of the overall claim that
there is more pressure to use selective incentives and discusses how this pressure might
comparatively vary across majoritarian and consensus democracies.
II. Patronage as Party Resource: Defining Patronage as Selective Incentive
Most generally, party patronage denotes particularistic and direct exchanges between party
politicians or functionaries and recipients in which resources the party as ‘patron’ controls are
exchanged for some kind of support (Müller 2006: 189). While this paper focuses on
members as recipients, likewise voters or party supporters outside the party organization can
be involved in these exchanges. Patronage relations are distinguishable from programmatic
linkages in that they are personalized. However, they can be directed towards different
functions: While ‘service patronage’ involves a non-simultaneous exchange of goods or
positions against supporters’ loyalty, ‘power patronage’ refers to the partisan distribution of
crucial positions in the civil service to assure the access to patronage goods in the first place
(Eschenburg 1961). In contrast to a distribution of posts on the basis of merit, hence, based on
impersonal criteria and technical competence, patronage can flourish especially in
professions, or in our case organizations, providing few impersonal mechanisms or objective
6
criteria of advancement and in which patronage goods can be monopolized by a group of
superiors (Abercrombie/Hill 1976: 423-4).
Beyond applying personal instead of generalist criteria for the selection of recipients,
patronage denotes an unequal and non-simultaneous exchange crucially different from
market-relations: A patron controlling a desired good has the choice to reward certain clients
and exclude others which gives him a stronger position in the exchange. Hence, the client
might provide support only in the expectation to be rewarded; vice versa, the patron
distributes a good in the expectation that loyalty will be maintained in the future. Since both
cannot be taken for granted patronage relations can be expected to be the less stable the less
the patron controls the patronage good as is particularly true when discussing party patronage.
Since patronage denotes a mode of exchange it is difficult to pin it down with regard
to the type of good which is distributed in the course of these exchanges beyond the statement
that such a good needs to be divisible and exclusive in order to gain value. Accordingly,
patronage goods can range from appointments and posts in the civil service over positions in
public-sector firms to pork-barrel legislation as common in the U.S. and micro-policies of
distributive character which favour particular clients as has been a common practice in Italy
(Cotta/Verzichelli 1996: 197).
Facing this range of goods, this paper has a particular focus on the distribution of posts and
appointments following a patronage-logic since it immediately affects the functioning of
parties as organizations: moreover, if internal posts form part of the available ‘patronage
goods’ the nature of patronage practices has an immediate impact on how parties organize:
Despite the usual use of patronage referring to the partisan penetration of bureaucracies and
state institutions (e.g. Manow 2002; Warner 1997) and its usual separation from appointments
of, for instance, cabinet posts (Müller 2000b: 141; Blondel 2000), patronage relations can be
equally found within parties, since positions can be easily distributed on the basis of personal
criteria to assure party workers’ on-going commitment and activity by rewarding their loyalty
(Wilson 1971) as will be specified later. Furthermore, works on party democracy have shown
that the distribution of appointments can supplement patronage practices (Blondel/Cotta 2000:
214). Especially government posts can be a resource for party elites to prolong and strengthen
their career within the leadership (Cotta/Verzichelli 1996: 185). Strictly speaking, patronage
7
practices are easier to implement in the sphere of political or organizational posts since access
to civil service can be restricted by a merit system resting on general performance criteria.1
Within parties, as Hooghe et al point out, ‘[n]etworks tend to be important for any
kind of political recruitment, and so we might expect that those strongly integrated in the
party fabric […] will have a better chance of acquiring leading political positions.’ (2004:
202). On the way towards these positions, patronage relations are likely to play a considerable
role. Note that this does not indicate a structural affinity between patronage practices and
parties with strong personalistic leaders since the latter tend to marginalize their party and
prefer more immediate links with followers (Gordin 2002: 541-2). As argued later, from a
theoretical viewpoint, exactly due to the personal link these exchanges rest upon, patronage
practices seem to be more efficient in generating support within decentralized structures.
It is important to note that patronage goods need not be material (Müller 2006: 189; 2000; for
a contrasting conception see Warren 1997) but might include immaterial decorations.2 In
order to conceptualize patronage as party resource in more general terms, it can be
characterized best as a selective incentive, including both selective solidary and selective
material incentives. Selective in contrast to collective incentives gain value because they are
attributed to only a sub-set of members and are not accessible through simply entering the
organization. Collective incentives can be either material or purposive, while collective
purposive benefits in particular are generated by a member’s affiliation to a shared cause the
organization stands for. Material incentives refer to money or equivalent resources being
either collectively or selectively available. Selective solidary incentives refer to status and
power related to organizational functions and positions, while collective solidary incentives
are generated by positive personal relations among the members in general (Wilson 1971: ch.
6).
Selective solidary and material incentives are often interconnected insofar as positions
involving a certain status are considered stepping-stones to access higher positions also
valuable in material terms. Evidently, the greatest conflict referring to these two types of
incentives evolves around their distribution with solidary incentives being able to generate at
1
This restriction exists only in some countries, while even there promotion follows a partisan rationale given
equal qualification of several candidates.
2
One example would be nominations for the British House of Lords as a compensation for financial
contributions by party supporters. Süddeutsche Zeitung, Finanzkrise bei Labour, Partei will sich mit Verkauf
ihrer alten Zentrale behelfen, 23. März 2006, p. 6.
8
least as severe conflicts as the distribution of material goods because it is often hard to
compensate for personal rejection through ‘side-payments’ (Wilson 1971: 36-45).
To conceptualize the use of patronage as the handling of selective incentives to assure
organizational loyalty allows specifying the difficulties to do so alongside with providing
non-material collective benefits for the group of members as a whole – be it related to policy
or to the distribution of decision-making rights between passive members and activists. While
Wilson assesses organizational challenges of parties which rest on one type of incentives–
material, solidary or purposive (1971: ch.6), regarding patronage, problems resulting from
‘selectiveness’ itself are particularly crucial, just to mention the most fundamental one, the
resulting inflationary tendency: the more selective benefits are provided, the less support can
be generated on their basis.
After having laid out the general perspective on patronage, section III points at several
developments which allow to hypothesize that the pressure on party leaders to provide
selective incentives – among them patronage - is growing due to processes of selection and
self-selection of active members resulting from changing member supply and demand.
III. Member Demand and Supply: Patterns of Selection and Self-Selection
In his critique of the - in his view - overly state-focused cartel party model introduced by Katz
and Mair (1995), Kitschelt has emphasized the necessity to take a more society-centred
perspective on parties’ role and position in order to discuss the relationship between parties
and supporters, mainly voters, more adequately. In particular, he points at a rather increasing
responsiveness of parties instead of a growing distance of parties from voters as claimed by
Katz and Mair (Kitschelt 2000a: 162). However, this critique is based on the assumption that
responsiveness to voters and distance from society cannot coexist, a claim which demands
qualification.
Given that parties’ responsiveness boils down to their programmatic assimilation
responding to changes in the electorate in which patterns of social division play less and less
a role, while issue- and personalized voting gain importance, this ‘undifferentiated’
responsiveness is fully compatible with ‘organizational dissociation’. And this dissociation
becomes visible through declining linkages to a broader base of supporters and changing
party-member relations. In fact, the two processes can be seen as corresponding and mutually
reinforcing. That responsiveness is no longer directed towards a particular social segment,
with which party members and supporters are affiliated, decreases the collective benefit
9
generated by party membership and regular vote-support in material and in ideological terms.
Simultaneously, parties loose the capacity to attract ideologically motivated members who
have available to themselves a range of more specific channels outside party which are
considered more adequate to articulate political positions. Being inside organizational
boundaries looses value for ordinary members since the party as organization looses profile. It
also increasingly frees voters to switch their party preference from one election to the other.
Wilson saw the weakness of political organization in general in the need to be inclusive which
debases the value of solidarity as one important collective benefit which is linked to
organizations’ exclusivity (1971: 96). While in the European context parties’ roots in social
milieus have long been a remedy to this problem, due to individualization processes, this
remedy no longer functions. As Katz points out, under these conditions, membership becomes
increasingly content free (2001: 289).
If, as a simultaneous outcome, party membership increasingly follows a rational and
individualist logic, intra-organizational relations need to become more particularistic and to
be based to a stronger degree on particularistic incentives. Hence, broad responsiveness and
weakening linkages to wider parts of society indeed correspond. The strategy of elites in some
parties to give the broad member basis more extensive decision-making rights in order to
enhance ordinary membership status can be regarded as an effort to increase the collective
benefit of membership. However, it has the intra-organizational repercussion to reduce the
incentives for activists – the middle strata of the party – whose status is devalued. An
alternative interpretation points at the intention of the party leadership to enhance their own
status to disempower the activists by empowering the broad membership basis, while at the
same time being able to proclaim a democratization of intra-party relations (Katz/Mair 1995;
Katz 1997). Facing a trade-off, it is not possible to decide which strategy is per se the most
beneficial from the viewpoint of organizational stability. Yet one might argue referring to
party characteristics is that smaller parties which have a smaller recruitment pool might be
less inclined to reduce incentives for these core members because they have bigger problems
to attract qualified personnel than bigger ones. Given that small parties tend to be more
specialized in the core issues they programmatically stand for one might also argue that they
are comparatively less affected by problems to generate collective benefits to the membership
as a whole than big catch all parties.
Interestingly, empirical studies on such reform endeavours more clearly point at the
negative impacts on the ‘middle ranks’ than at the positive effects on the broader membership
likely to follow: A study that analyzes the attitudes of passive and active members as well as
10
of party delegates towards procedural decentralization of candidate selection within
Norwegian parties shows that party delegates – since they have most to lose – do not favour
internal ‘democratization’ reducing their own privileges (Saglie/Heidar 2004: 401).
Interestingly, ordinary members equally were not eager to enhance their status within the
organization. Not only did they not support a shift of candidate selection away from the party
congress to the basis, but preferred (in contrast to the higher ranks) the party to pay more
attention to voters (Saglie/Heidar 2004: 397-9). Indeed, the smaller group of middle-rank
members perceives the trade-off between increasing the weight of ordinary members and of
voters and their own intra-organizational weakening. This, however, is not the case for the
much bigger group of ordinary members who do neither gain nor lose a lot by such changes.
Returning to the Kitschelt critique of the cartel party approach (2000a), the claim of ‘growing
distance to society’ implying that parties substitute linkages to society by linkages to the state
(Mair/Katz 1995; Mair 1997) demands qualification as well. While indeed capturing a general
tendency, it draws attention away from the increasingly diversified character of linkages to
society which parties still try to maintain. Facing a rationalization of voting as well as of votemaximization strategies in Western democracies, a parallel rationalization of membership
selection and self-selection is likely. This interpretation gains leverage when social changes
and their impact on the supply side of membership is taken into consideration. While it is an
overall trend that party members increasingly age and parties’ capacity to recruit young
members declines, unconventional participation is on the rise. Participation becomes a
conscious choice since standard social structural differences - compared to motivational
interest, the role of agencies and social networks - loose importance to explain patterns of
party membership on the individual level (Norris 2002: 133-34). Linking these changes in the
predominant triggers for party membership to the growing incapacity of parties to provide
solidary and purposive collective benefits, it comes as no surprise that citizens engaging in
unconventional participation tend to be comparatively younger (Della Porta 2005; McAdam
1988; Norris 2002). Social movements, as one example for unconventional participation, tend
to be more issue-specific and provide a stronger platform for identification than parties with
an increasingly blurring profile do. Since modern societies become increasingly differentiated
systems far beyond the segmentation along class lines, a high specialization of alternative
voluntary organizations for citizen representation and their greater appeal to young purposedriven members with a high degree of enthusiasm comes as no surprise. Accordingly, single
issue political movements have been considered as a response to the quest for broadening
11
participation (Kaase/Barnes 1979: 525), while parties are hardly able to reconcile the demands
of the majority of passive citizens which they prioritise in order to win elections and an
educated active minority which tends to resort to unconventional forms of participation
(Kaase/Barnes 1979: 533-4).
This does not mean that there is a simple trade-off between party membership and the
engagement in alternative channels. Distinguishing four types of participants (excluding the
inactives) and examining participation behaviour in five countries, Kaase and Marsh
concluded that only the conformists and the protesters resorted to one type of participation
only, (conventional and unconventional forms respectively), while reformists and activists
used both (Kaase/Marsh 1979: 153-7). Also more recent work shows that overall participation
in new social movements is positively correlated with party membership (Della Porta 2005:
25; Norris 2002: 211-12). However, given that active membership in any organization is timeconsuming, it is likely that citizens have to set priorities where to invest their time. Further,
unconventional channels often profit from their opposition to state-related channels to which
political parties up to now doubtlessly belong finding its clearest expression in the official
exclusion of parties from movement initiatives (Della Porta 2005: 22). Overall, criticism of
parties is dominant in current political and public discourse (Mair 2005) and there is evidence
that political distrust prompts individuals to seek access to politics unconventional and nonpartisan means (Cain et al. 2003; Dalton 2004).
In sum, one can conclude that the more programmatically open parties become, the
less they can catch up with the societal trends towards individualization and an increasingly
conscious choice of participatory channels which ex ante tend to privilege more specific
organizations when it comes to the attraction of young and often highly educated activists. To
link this to the issue of party-member relations, declining overall membership does not only
lead to the downsizing of the group of core activists, parties less and less tend to be first
choice for those who engage in civic activism. Correspondingly, studies of parties’ youth
organizations indicate that they lose members more rapidly than parties in general (Hooghe et
al 2004: 196). Hence, in face of an extension of active citizens’ participatory repertoire,
parties tend to be on the loosing side.
Parties have advantages on the side of selective benefits due to their high organizational
development and their privileged access to state resources which they can exploit to
compensate for their declining substantial or affective appeal. Collective material benefits
related to party membership necessarily loose practical importance in increasingly affluent
12
societies. While parties are usually incapable to provide sufficiently high benefits to all of
their members, the challenge is manageable regarding selective benefits to a clearly restricted
group. Simultaneously, members are likely to respond to what is ‘on offer’ and the dominant
motivational drive of core members is likely to show a stronger orientation towards these
types of incentives. Albeit it is certainly an oversimplification to claim that the group of active
members is homogeneously driven by the same motives, it has been argued that ideologues
among them are the least dominant the higher a party’s chances of government participation
(Kitschelt 1989: 47-8; 57). Since not only the established but new parties as well increasingly
participate in government, the hypothesized internal shift towards pragmatist candidates gains
plausibility.
Given that the greater dependence of party elites on selective incentives is also
reinforced by party leaders’ strategic choice in the electoral arena as argued before, we end up
in a vicious circle in which growing distrust in parties increases voter volatility (Dalton 2005:
944) again increasing the pressure both to pursue vote-maximizing strategies and to establish
more particularistic linkages inside. In how far party elites had or still have the chance to
counteract these dynamics is questionable since they seem to express a wider process of social
transformation in which not only party identification has eroded in nearly all major
democracies irrespective of their institutional make-up (Dalton 2000) but individuals’
affiliations to societal groups in general. What is, however, crucial at this point is to be aware
of increasingly contradictory demands of party-voter and party-member relations: While for
instance the dissociation from affiliate organizations such as unions is considered an effort of
party elites to gain more programmatic flexibility (Mair 1997), one can also argue that, by
doing so, they give up resources stabilizing their organizational infrastructure resulting from
the close link between the different organizational elites.
Evidently, it is one thing to say that the pool of core members changes due to changed societal
supply, it is again another thing to say that elites’ might demand a different type of member as
potential aspirant for public office and higher positions in the party organization due to
changes of politics as a profession. Increasing professionalization of politics has certainly
raised expectations towards politicians in terms of expertise and communication skills which
– being already confronted with a shrinking pool of aspirants - narrows down the group of
potential candidates. Moreover, corresponding to the hypothesized change in party-voter
relations, recruitment patterns have been affected as well in that strong personal appearance
coupled with programmatic flexibility and efficiency seems to gain weight over ideological
13
convictions. The rise of personalized campaigns is an expression of this trend. As far as the
profile of the modern politician moves towards the profile of a manager of public funds with
decreasing leeway of action due to domestic and international constraints, the stronger the
need for pragmatists which is likely to impact upon the recruitment style by current elites.3 To
put it in Wilson’s words, political elites ‘have little interest in public policy but considerable
interest in finding a candidate for the top of the ticket who will increase the chances of
winning the election and at the same time be responsive to the rank and file’s desire for a
share in the proceeds of winning.’ (1973: 37). Arguing that such candidates are likely to have
better chances to move up the internal party hierarchy, not only a bias against ideologues on
behalf of current elites can be hypothesized, but the patterns of self-selection of potential
party activists describe before is reinforced.
The major goal of this section was to elaborate on several trade-off relations party elites face
and have increasing difficulties to balance in modern democracies. Both on the supply side
and the demand side of membership, factors tend to support processes of member selection
and self-selection producing a shift in core member motivations towards more pragmaticindividualist away from purposive-collective orientations. Most fundamentally, parties’
increasingly less differentiated responsiveness to the broader electorate extends the collective
benefit of a parties’ victory to a larger group of voters. Simultaneously this decreases the
collective benefits of being the member of a particular party regarding material, solidary and
purposive incentives alike. In particular the weakening of solidary and purposive incentives
disadvantages the party compared to more issue-specific and less hierarchical channels for
interest articulation and representation – especially among young citizens. Vice versa, parties
are more dependent on their pool of selective incentives they have broader access to than less
established voluntary organizations. To increase the collective benefit for the broad member
basis by decentralizing decision-making processes (as compared to mere supporters), reduces
the selective benefits available to the middle ranks of the party which do most of the work.
Assuming that core members are still needed, one arrives at the expectation that party elites
might less readily resort to broadly based member ballots for candidate selection than
proponents of the cartel theory expect (e.g. Katz 2001: 292). Finally, the changing
professional profile is likely to favour the selection of pragmatists over ideologues. Along
with membership research modern party member can be understood as one less emotionally
3
See for a discussion of the link between activists’ motivation and recruitment styles Kitschelt (1989: 49-53).
14
affiliated to a party but one who chooses to become active based on a cost-benefit calculation
(Biehl 2004: 683).
IV. The Use of Patronage as Resource
IV.1 Problems of Access, Control and Feedback
Facing this set of indications that the demand for selective incentives and with it patronage
might increase in modern democracies, this section deals with the problems involved in using
patronage as a resource to maintain the support of core members. Party elites need to cope
with three major challenges: acquiring access to and control over patronage goods and the
handling of negative feedback of patronage practices. Negative feedback refers to the
reactions of party members and voters facing the distribution of patronage goods on the basis
of personal loyalty instead of merit (Warner 1997; Kitschelt 2000a; 2000b). The latter is often
difficult to pin down empirically because loyalty of a person towards party elites goes often
hand in hand with his or her continuous work for the party. However, since valuable positions
are less numerous than active members interested in them, in-depth analysis should allow to
identify whether the final choice tends to be made in favour of personal protégés or not (see
for instance Carty’s analysis of the intra-partisan conflicts in the Canadian Liberal Party over
Chrétien’s succession in 2002 (Carty 2003)). There are likely to be two types of reactions,
activists who are alienated because they reject the practice of patronage itself and those who
feel rejected because they have not received anything themselves. If party elites are not
vulnerable to electoral dissatisfaction as a result of party collusion, the threat of voters’
negative feedback does not provide a strong disincentive to refrain from patronage (Hopkins
2004). However, it will show later that the internal repercussions complicate the use of
patronage to generate support to a considerable extent.
The problem of access to patronage refers first to intra-organizational limitations to
endlessly create new positions as rewards. Second, it refers to the availability of state
resources which might be more or less limited across countries due to the development the
bureaucracies in the respective country (Shefter 1994; Manow 2002).4 The control of
patronage resources is closely tied to access. Still, while access refers to the capacity to get
hold of resources, control refers to the capacity to decide upon the mode of these resources’
4
In order to account for practices of clientilism across countries and across time, Piattoni (2001: 19-24) applies
the concept of ‚opportunity costs and ‚political opportunity structure’ inherent in the institutional set-up of
different states (one crucial variable is the status of the bureaucracy). The broader concepts of access, control and
feedback are preferred because by denote three core challenges related to the successful use of patronage. In
particular, they allow including intra-organizational pressures that need to be considered simultaneously with the
institutional framework in which parties make their strategic choices to understand the obstacles involved in
patronage practices.
15
distribution (Müller 2000b: 154) and to the capacity to find an efficient mode of distribution
which can assure organizational stability in the long run.
In contrast to existing approaches of patronage which concentrate on the crucial
question of access to state resources that can used for patronage or on the impact of negative
feedback to these practices (Kitschelt 2000a; 2000b; Manow 2002; Warner 1997), the
following discussion deals with the challenges to distributed patronage goods efficiently and
points to the problems even when resources are continuously available.
To discuss the use of patronage goods within party organizations links closely to the concept
of the clientilist party in which party elites focus comparatively little in modes of interest
aggregation and program formation and, instead, create bonds to their followers through
direct and personal exchanges (Kitschelt 2000b: 849). While the following discussion profits
considerably from Kitschelt’s work on clientilist versus programmatic linkages between
parties and voters, it deviates from his perspective in two respects: first, it narrows the focus
down from keeping supporters satisfied (the perspective existing approaches on party
patronage take as well) to motivating activists for their on-going work and, with that, to
keeping a pool of potential office-aspirants ready as the core rationale of party elites’
investments in the ‘party on the ground’. Second, while the clientilist party centers around the
provision of material selective benefits (Kitschelt 2000b: 849), discussing the use of selective
incentives refers to both material and solidary incentives. For instance, the distribution of
honours forms part of patronage practices which is plausible because social relationships
directly shape intra-organizational dynamics. The attribution of recognition can function as an
effective reward, at the same time, it can cause severe conflict if members feel unjustly
excluded. More generally, the maintenance of the goodwill of a specific person is one form of
solidarity incentive which is both specific in effect and widely employed in civic associations
(Wilson 1973: 40) and directly corresponds with the personalised logic of patronage
exchanges. Accordingly, in a study of Norwegian party members members and delegates
likewise emphasize the relevance of personal networks over formal procedures (Salgie/Heidar
2004: 401).
Including solidary incentives also makes clear that the orientation towards selective
benefits may not be equated with members being ‘materialists’. However, in order to motivate
activists to work more than passive members do, it seems a realistic claim that they demand
something more exclusive for themselves than club goods or purposive satisfaction which is
open to every ordinary member. This argument gains particular weight considering the
16
waning capacity to generate collective benefits parties face as argued before and the minor
relevance of the necessarily limited material benefits parties can offer their membership as a
whole in the context of increasingly wealthy societies. Studies on party activism show that a
variety of selective incentives play a powerful role in motivating activism. Activists’
perceived impact on the provision of collective goods as ‘middle level elite’ and expressive
motives are important factors as well (Whiteley et al.1993: 90-1). However, although the two
motives are not material, one can argue that at least the former is reinforced by activists’
privileged status over ordinary members.
IV.2 The Problem of Controlling Patronage Exchanges
Section II already pointed to the core aspects which characterize the handling of patronage
goods: First, patronage goods need to remain selective. Second, they are provided by a nonsimultaneous exchange whose completion is insecure in that neither patron nor recipients can
be sure that the desired good (loyalty or some kind of reward) will be provided. This is
especially true since – albeit the party elites as patron might control a desired good – the
dependency of the recipient on the respective good is limited (at least as long as patronage
relations do not dominate the whole political and economic system). Simply speaking,
members can exit parties and a party career is not the only option, especially for those
members with considerable professional skills which parties attempt to attract. Third, the
mode of distribution is based on personal criteria, which are hardly clear-cut and again add to
the insecurity on the side of recipients. Finally, it is often the case that a considerable part of
positions functioning as patronage goods cannot be simply re-distributed whenever it is
convenient for the party elites in principle controlling distribution.
Each of these characteristics inherent in the nature of such exchanges creates problems
regarding the capacity to maintain organizational loyalty through complicating in particular
the control over patronage distribution and therefore has direct organizational implications
for parties heavily relying on patronage.
Starting with the most fundamental problem of selectiveness: the inflationary nature of
patronage goods has been frequently noted. Most generally speaking, the more widely
patronage goods are provided, the less it is a reward to receive them from the individual point
of view.
To use patronage resources most efficiently, the major challenge is to find an
equilibrium between the multiplication of rewards while keeping them effective by
17
maintaining sufficient exclusiveness. This problem becomes most visible when thinking of
non-material decorations which most easily loose value when too many people receive them
in particular since status of a post is more difficult to increase than a salary is raised. When
allocating material rewards, one strategy to circumvent the problem can aim at increasing the
value of individual rewards over time and to set up a differentiated incentive system where
one post or rewards is a requirement to access a more valuable one. This, of course,
presupposes an expansion of goods shifting the problem in part from a more efficient
distribution to one of increased access. In order to increase the share of available incentives
internally, one can expect a party organization to differentiate, a process which faces practical
limitations (Panebiaco 1988). External state sources provide an alternative pool of patronage
goods (Shefter 1994; Manow 2002) which becomes all the more important as soon as limits of
internal differentiation are reached.
Irrespective of particular access problems which are not addressed in the paper, an
increasing reliance on selective benefits tends to trigger an increasing demand because it
simultaneously devalues the collective benefits free for everyone due to the formers’ greater
exclusivity. This is particularly true for collective solidary incentives based on group
belonging which are difficult to reconcile with differentiating between members. If the
increased use of selective incentives weakens the effect of collective incentives (in addition to
the problematic devaluation of group membership through vote-maximizing tactics mentioned
before), again the likely response is to increase the use of selective benefits by extending the
types of resources distributed as patronage goods. Accordingly as Müller’s analysis of eight
European countries (2000b) shows that in countries in which patronage is most pervasive
parties use a great variety of resources to satisfy their followers. The difficulty to find an
equilibrium between a extended pool of patronage recipients without inflating resources
excessively creates doubts whether patronage systems can be expected to be stable in the long
run. Empirical cases do not provide a clear answer: while the Italian system broke down in the
1990s, the Belgium system survived.
Remaining on the theoretical level, it is not only resource inflation which points at a
possible ‘stability problem’ of patronage systems due to the difficulty to find the right
equilibrium of patronage provision. The flipside of the coin is the demoralizing impact of
exclusion that party elites might want to reduce as far as possible. The ‘inflation argument’
points at a middle solution as a response, in which exclusion is reduced by multiplying
rewards without devaluing them excessively. Regarding those additionally included in the
groups of the rewarded, which are motivated to continue their work, this strategy sounds
18
reasonable. However, the situation looks different from the other side. To be excluded from
rewards which are very valuable yet very rare might be less demoralizing than from rewards
which are more numerously distributed albeit less valuable. Up to a certain point, the less
exclusion there is, the less acceptable it becomes from the individual point of view to belong
to the group of excluded. To increase support through inclusion seems to nourish the intensity
of negative feedback generated by exclusion (until inclusion is so extensive that rewards have
lost value for both, those included and those excluded). Hence, assessing the problem based
on the number of satisfied versus the number of unsatisfied clients only, the identification of
an ‘equilibrium’ is feasible. This, however, does not take into account the intensities of
reactions which might have considerable internal consequences as well.
If it is plausible that party elites extend the types of resources used for patronage over time, it
is necessary to ask for possible problems resulting from the simultaneous handling of different
types of patronage resources, most fundamentally, of solidary selective incentives and of
material ones. One can expect that a honour system works most efficiently when there is no
competition for another type of benefit which are more concrete than status. One way to deal
with this problem to transform non-materially valued positions into a stepping-stone to
achieve material compensation. Hence, with increasing pressure to provide selective
incentives, one should expect that career paths leading to high public or intra-organizational
offices to become more clearly defined within the organization and that outside nominations
become less accepted. This seems also plausible when demanding more qualified candidates
since the need to climb an internal ladder provides for a more solid check of aspirants whether
they provide the desired qualification.
Taking programmatic flexibility as important, the use of patronage has advantages
insofar as patronage-motivated activists provide leaders with more leeway than programmotivated ‘believers’. However, this is the case as long as their compensation is secure, they
tend to be less reliable in times of crisis (Müller 2006: 191) which points at another source of
instability in organizations heavily relying on selective incentives. Even if access to resources
is not the problem, the ‘re-distribution’ of patronage resources is easier in theory than in
practice. Many posts cannot just be redistributed whenever it might be strategically useful
which introduces another limitation to party elites’ efficient control over patronage goods.
Given that parties try to extend the resources they use for patronage, the more they have to
deliver, the more a shift towards flexible goods such as micro-policies is likely. Analyzing
patronage systems over time, one crucial question is therefore whether the resources primarily
19
exploited in patronage exchanges systematically change with the growing dependency of a
party on these resources.
This also points at the impact of the non-simultaneous nature of the exchange. Party elites are
able to create incentives for loyalty by controlling certain goods most effectively as long as
they have not distributed the latter, simply because they will not pay off all the activists. The
selection of a candidate for a post on the basis of his or her past loyalty does not assure that
the person will show the same behaviour in the future. This problem might be less present as
long as the person still aspires to climb up the career ladder which the organizational elites
control and which prolongs the clients’ dependency. In any case, whenever posts are
distributed for longer periods, the one-sidedness of the dependency relationship is heavily
reduced, not to speak of the motivation of those which did not receive any share without an
alternative posts being on offer. In fact, the higher the posts are located in the hierarchy, the
fewer equivalent alternatives for compensation there might be after they have been
distributed. At the same time, the higher the level, the more investments aspirants are likely to
have made so that exit might be less and less an option. Following this argument again
underpins the expectation that outside nominations should become rare since exit for outsiders
is much less costly whenever they are not rewarded as expected. Not only are outside
nominations a possible source of frustration for those who try to climb up the hierarchy
internally, it also implies a reduced control of party elites over their potential successors due
to outsiders’ relative costs of exit.
To say that patronage resources are ‘secure’ as Müller (2006: 191) referred to can
mean that the party (for instance a regular partner in an oversized cabinet or a dominant party
per se) can continuously access patronage resources in state institutions. However, this does
not solve the insecurity problem from a potential recipient’s perspective inherent in patronage
exchanges. Further, spoils are allocated based on personal criteria. Both aspects imply that the
increasing reliance on such exchanges might favour the factionalization of parties, their
disaggregation into smaller units, allowing for a more direct and personal relationship
between faction leaders which increases the control on both sides of the exchange. Within
such structures, which respond to the nature of patronage relations, support can be more
effectively maintained: supporters can be sure that a fixed share of patronage resources will
be received by their faction within which they have more individual weight than in the party
20
as a whole.5 While still not everybody can be compensated, the perceived insecurity whether
to be rewarded is reduced. Moreover, and this relates back to the growing challenge to
balance collective purposive benefits and selective benefits in modern parties, to maintain
such a balance tends to be easier in more homogeneous, ideologically coherent sub-units.
Hence, given that in smaller groups a collective ID develops and is maintained more easily,
also the pressure to continuously provide of selective benefits tends to be lower.
Note that this line of argument does not tell anything about the distributive scheme
between factions which needs to be set on a higher organizational level and if questioned
might function as a trigger to undermine the overall party organization by provoking splits
(the same problem is given on the level of the party system if patronage resources have to be
distributed between several parties). However, given that such a scheme is in place,
decentralized structures seem to be more adequate to stabilize patronage-based relations – a
conclusion which to a certain degree contradicts theories on party organization pointing at the
tendency towards power concentration on the party leadership and stronger hierarchies within
parties (Michels 1970; Kirchheimer 1966; Panebianco 1988) and, with that, to a centralization
of patronage resources as well.
Following the same rationale, within federal systems one can hypothesize that national
elites’ effort and success to monopolize patronage resources is unlikely because of the
disrupting effects of personal linkages between supporters and sub-national elites and of the
resistance of sub-national actors. In general, while the nationalization of party programs might
support centralizing tendencies within parties and within polities alike, patronage practices
themselves imply a decentralized organization of these exchanges. More generally, while
collective benefits emphasize the equality of members, selective benefits naturally emphasize
the relevance of individual characteristics which can be expected to feed back to the nature of
party organization.
The following table sums up the characteristics of patronage exchanges and the
expected consequences when party elites strongly depend on those exchanges to generate
support.
5
Mershon (2002), for instance, showed that in former DC cabinets, cabinet posts and junior minister positions
were allocated according to factional strength.
21
Table 1: Problems to Control Patronage as a Resource
Characteristics of Patronage Relations in Parties and
Consequences
Selectiveness of Distribution:
- Trade-off selective vs. collective benefits/ selective
material vs. selective solidary benefit→ increasing
demand for patronage goods over time
- Inflationary tendency (accelerated by increasing
demand)
- Stronger negative impact of exclusion, the fewer are
excluded
- Limits to the Re-distribution of goods:
→ limitations on strategic use of patronage
- Limited dependency between patron and client in
voluntary associations
- Non-simultaneous exchanges/uncertainty of exchange
completion
→ proximity between patron and recipient to reduce
uncertainty to increase perceived likelihood of being
rewarded
- Personal criteria for distribution
→ proximity between patron and recipient favourable to
maintain direct relationships
Implications/Challenges for the Control of Patronage
Resources
→ broader of range of resources used for patronage over time
→ the more material resources are used the more difficult to
generate support based on solidary incentives
→ efforts to link solidary and material selective incentives as
stepping-stones in career paths
→ increasing seclusion to enter politics ‘from outside’
→ problem to identify equilibrium between multiplication of
resources to satisfy maximal number of supporters without
excessive devaluation
→ growing inclusion can intensify negative feedback
→ shift towards more flexible goods with increasing use of
patronage allocation
→ the threat of exit; no ‘stable’ dependency/ less outside
nominations because active members less prone to exit the more
they have invested already
→ factionalization of parties to reduce uncertainty on both sides
of the exchange/ vice versa, centralization of control over
patronage unlikely
V. Conclusion and Outlook: Patronage as Party Resource
This paper has argued that - in the context of increasingly individualized societies - the
pressure for party elites to provide selective incentives to maintain their party organization
tends to grow. At the same time patronage exchanges as one type of selective incentives are in
their very nature difficult to use as resource to generate stable member support when thinking
of their organizational repercussions on the meso and micro level. In this concluding section I
return to the macro level and ask for elements in the political system that might strengthen or
weaken the challenge to balance collective and selective benefits. Party system dynamics play
an important role and demand detailed comparative examination to specify the general claims
introduced in the first section of the paper. Due to the limitations of one single paper, only
some preliminary remarks can be made at that point.
It has been frequently claimed that competition provides a remedy against patronage (Della
Porta/Vannecci 1999: 113; Stigler 1972). Looking at the countries using patronage most
extensively, namely Italy, Belgium and Austria, this claim gains a certain weight. On a
theoretical level, however, the linkage between competition and weak patronage practices is
less clear. As Manow argues, one can equally imagine parties to compete for patronage
22
resources (2002:
23; also Warner 1997). Such competition can be thought to be most
pronounced when the government monopolizes patronage resources and tends to be minimal
winning because in this constellation the exclusion of the opposition is strongest. As a
consequence, one might argue, intra-organizational demands can be most easily satisfied
because government parties have comparatively more spoils that are available or can be
created6 because they do not have to share them with outside parties. Yet simultaneously,
long-term continuity is difficult to assure since loosing government leaves a party without any
access at all. Therefore it is plausible to argue that alternation renders patronage less attractive
since parties cannot continuously guarantee its supply to their supporters due to a continuous
access problem. The inherent volatility of patronage exchanges themselves, when it comes to
an efficient control of its distribution and their repercussions for the maintenance of intraorganizational support even if access is given, stresses this point. Alternatively, if parties
resort to patronage, either it is likely that patronage goods are not monopolized by
government parties or most parties enter government in the first place, hence government
itself is subject to proportional distribution. Although Blondel has pointed to an increasing use
of patronage in majoritarian systems such as Spain and the UK (2002), it is still fairly
restricted compared to what he classifies as ‘patrimonial systems’ such as Belgium.
Arguing that the pressure to use selective incentives, in general, increases, necessarily
brings up the question whether one should expect parties to reduce competition and pursue
collusion strategies in order to be able to distribute the spoils while avoiding the negative
feedback resulting from possible alternation. Thinking of patronage in the context of the
internal balancing collective and selective benefits and of the tension between votemaximization and clear programmatic stands leads to a different argument supporting a
greater propensity of consensus systems to use patronage extensively.
One might argue that due to strong majority-opposition dynamics the erosion of
programmatic profiles affects parties in majoritarian systems to a comparatively weaker
degree than in consensual ones where the majority-opposition dualism is much less pervasive.
To put it differently, in these contexts systemic dynamics make it easier for parties to
associate themselves with functional roles which can partially compensates for the loss of
clear programmatic stands. While government parties might resort to a certain degree to
patronage to compensate their supporters for limited programmatic achievements in
majoritarian systems (Blondel 2002), parties’ roles in the system as either government or
opposition should impact upon the members which can be unified as collective behind the
6
See on this particular point Mershon (2002)
23
goal either of preventing the opposition to gain power or of gaining power oneself. For sure,
this dynamic is not equivalent to an ideologically coherent program which generates
purposive incentives. However, it provides a counterweight to the selective sources of support
such as patronage which tend to have a disaggregating impact on parties as organizations by
making it easier for party elites to keep their organizations together.
Doubtlessly, it is crucial to further elaborate on the specification of the institutional context’s
impact on the use of patronage. But this does not change the general claim of the paper.
Following the major rationale of the cartel party approach it has been argued that selective
incentives – as opposed to collected benefits - can be expected to become increasingly
important for the maintenance of parties in Western industrial democracies. However, in
contrast to this approach, party elites will not try to get rid of ‘the party on the ground’
completely but shift their focus on qualified core members. Hence, party-member linkages are
likely to be transformed in that they get increasingly particularistic by resorting to incentives
accessible for active members and potential aspirants for higher office only, while party-voter
relations become increasingly unspecific and ad hoc. In this context, also patronage can be
expected to gain importance. While facing contradictory electoral and organizational
pressures, patterns of member selection and self-selection seem to correspond and support a
shift towards more pragmatic-individualist and less purposive-collective member motivations.
The second part of the paper focused on the problems involved in controlling patronage
resources by looking at the characteristics of patronage exchanges themselves and their
organizational implications for party elites resorting to these resources likely to display on the
meso and micro level.
So far, the intra-organizational triggers to increasingly use patronage, its interplay with
party elites’ electoral strategies and its societal roots have not been spelled out systematically.
Engaging in such a debate, there are reasons why we should not only expect parties to
converge in their electoral strategies but also in their strategies to maintain organizational
support. Most generally, to arrive at a comprehensive account of patronage as party resource
in modern party democracy, it is necessary to consider societal and institutional macro
dynamics in their interplay with organizational challenges rooted in the meso and micro level
where patronage exchanges are managed. This paper has tried to make some first steps into
this direction.
24
Acknowledgements:
I thank the ‘Mannheim crew’ Evelyn Bytzek and Bernhard Miller as well as Christine Reh for
their helpful comments and criticisms.
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