28
1998 regional reform in Poland is said to have created a massive increase in patronage and in
regional employment as a way to build up weak party organizations.
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Why, then, could competition limit state politicization, rather than promoting logrolling and
cartellization? Simply put, the threat presented by a critical opposition makes such deals
impermanent and unenforceable. Two fundamental conditions for both cartel-like collusion
among parties and the side payments that accompany logrolling are long time horizons and the
continuity of the involved actors.
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Without the expectation that the contract can continue
indefinitely, the deal falls apart. And without the expectation that the same set of actors will be
around to reciprocate and repay the concession by party X, there is little reason for X to make the
concession.
In a highly competitive context, turnover in office means that it is impossible to assume that
the same set of governing parties will be in office to continue the collusion in the next electoral
term. Fragmentation makes enforcing the contract difficult: if the senior governing party does not
provide a side payment or a set share of state resources to party X, X can defect: but there will be
several other parties to take its place. X thus has no means of enforcing the logroll or maintaining
the cartel. Finally, critical opposition monitors the government’s behavior, and brings its
shortcomings and abuses to light, further making collusion difficult to sustain. This is especially
true when a quasi-third-party monitor and enforcer exists, a role played by the European Union
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O’Dwyer, Conor. “Civilizing the state bureaucracy: The Unfulfilled Promise of Public Administration Reform in
Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic (1990-2000), Berkeley Program in Soviet and Post Soviet Studies, Spring
2002. Yet the empirical evidence does not unequivocally support the argument O’Dwyer posits that the jobs were
“either created or reassigned,” but the government statistics posit these positions were shifted, not created.
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Cartels further demand keeping internal factions in line, the ability to enforce and punish the smallest
transgression, and the ability to ride out demand and supply slumps. See Deborah Spar, The Cooperative Edge: The
Internal Politics of International Cartels. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Side payments can be effective in
buying support if preferences over policy are held with unequal intensity, there are multiple issues over which the
parties can bargain, and repeated play is ensured. Buchanan and Tullock, The Calculus of Consent 1963. Weingast
and Marshall emphasize the temporal aspects of logrolling, and the non-simultaneity of exchanges. Weingast, Barry,
and Marshall, William. “The Industrial Organization of Congress; or, Why Legislatures, Like Firms, Are Not
Organized as Markets,” Journal of Political Economy. 1988, vol 96, no 1: 132-163.
Convention