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downwards by decentralizing. All such moves would remove considerable decisionmaking and
material resources from governing party hands. Relatively certain of returning to office and
continuing as the chief beneficiary of state resources, these parties could politicize the state.
The significance of a critical opposition is further illustrated by Latvia. Ostensibly, its party
system is highly competitive, with high turnover and fragmentation. However, no critical
opposition arose in the early years of the transition: all the governments after the communist
collapse were post-opposition, nationalist coalitions, which excluded a priori the participation of
the main opposition party, the pro-Russian PCTVL. Without a credible threat of replacement,
formal institutions were either weak or delayed: all but one were implemented after 1997. In
these cases, governing parties politicized the state, precluding formal reforms and instead relying
on informal extraction of resources from the state. These parties could also continue to build up
resources, both because there was little monitoring or sanctioning of their actions, and because
their coalition partners had “nowhere else” to turn. Turnover and fragmentation by themselves,
therefore, are not sufficient to limit politicization.
In more competitive systems, even if governing parties attempted to politicize the state, their
impact was limited. Such parties still had incentives to politicize the state: for example, where
party elites had to satisfy the demands of internal party factions, or regional “barons” to whom
elites owed their elected positions, or narrow constituencies to whom particularist goods were
promised, state politicization was an attractive proposition. However, such parties had far fewer
opportunities to do so. Thanks to turnover, parties could not accumulate benefits. And, given the
constant monitoring and oversight by opposition parties, no one party could get away with
extensive incursions into the state. Thus, in both Poland and in Hungary, the post-communist and
the post-opposition camps were clear, critical, and credible: and such competition created the
Convention