Oligarchic Party-Group Relations in Bulgaria

The Extended Parentela Policy Network Model

Mihail Petkov

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319988986
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319988993
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Comparative Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book argues that the relationship between political parties, civil service and party insider groups in Bulgaria is oligarchic. It also argues that these oligarchic dynamics overlap with the parentela policy network, which is a relationship where a ruling party interferes with the civil service to the benefit of its own insider group. In Bulgaria, party-wide executive appointments attract businesses to seek insider status hoping to expand their activities through prejudiced regulatory inspections as one form of executive interference. Such inspections constitute a veiled attempt to coerce a business, which is in a direct market competition with the party insider or in party political opposition. Any such successful party-insider relationship forms an oligarchic elite, which then converts political access into capital and coerces its rivals into losing parliamentary elections. When ruling parties change, the cycle is repeated, as the newly formed elite seeks to check all and any rivals.

© The Author(s) 2019

Mihail PetkovOligarchic Party-Group Relations in Bulgariahttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98899-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Extended Parentela

Mihail Petkov¹

(1)

Naples, FL, USA

Mihail Petkov

End Abstract

Introduction

Democratic policy-making and politics are often equated to elections, Presidents, Premiers and Parliaments. Voters and the media are usually focused on what politicians say and do, creating the impression that this is politics in its totality. Of course, this is not the case. Politics is a highly informal enterprise and many if not all policies originate from some form of informal or semiformal communication among interest groups, civil servants, the Parliament and the party in power. The present book, therefore, looks into one such form of informal interaction between interest groups and political parties known in the literature as the parentela policy network model. It is an analytical extension of a doctoral study, which was conducted from 2012 to 2016, and also which was focused on verifying that model still existed today, and if that was indeed the case, establish how the Bulgarian parentela differed from its original version in 1960s Italy. The main argument here is that not only does the parentela exist in Bulgaria in an advanced form, it also generates an oligarchic dynamic. Ultimately, the final chapters will bring the analysis to the hypothesis that the diminishing inter-party competition will transform the oligarchic parentela dynamic into a status quo.

But let us not go too far too soon.

The parentela is a netowrk relationship model where an interest group with an insider access to the ruling party extends its reach into the civil service¹ usually, but not limited to, nominating new or utilizing existing party political appointees in the Bureaucracy. In the 1960s, Joseph La Palombara observed (in his Interest Groups in Italian Politics (1964)) a type of a party-group relationship which provided the Catholic Action (CA) interest group privileged access to policy-making at the expense of other interest groups competing for the same (e.g. Confindustria). The purpose of his book was to find out how Italian interest groups participated in the policy-making process and influenced it. The success of CA was due to its ability to lend its large supporter base and financial resources to the already ideologically receptive Christian Democrats (DC). In the relationship which he later called parentela, the party insider (CA) assumed influential policy-making access because the DC intervened on its behalf in the civil service . Although the book also mentions civil service reforms, it emphasizes that political appointments were the primary method of intervening in the civil service . Though legal, this practice had the effect of subordinating the bureaucracy with politically dependent bureaucrats acting as conduits of the decisions taken between the party and its insider ( parente collectively). Moreover, often La Palombara’s respondents reported that appointed civil servants were nominated by the party insider as opposed to the party . Thus, by nominating new or utilizing existing party political appointments , the CA dominated policy-making in 1960s Italy.

Nearly thirty years later, Alan Greer presented another case of the parentela policy network but this time in Northern Ireland (Greer 1994). In his study, he focused on the extent to which the existence of hegemonic political parties explained the parentela formation. In doing so he researched the relationship between the Ulster Farmers’ Union and the Unionist Party’s government of Premier Stormont for the period from the 1920s to 1970s. Accordingly, he found that in line with the parentela dynamic established by La Palombara , the Unionist party appointed as ministers of agriculture nominees from the Ulster Farmers’ Union. This symbiotic relationship rested on the exchange for political support by UFU’s membership in exchange of Stormont protecting UFU’s interests by appointing their nominations as agricultural ministers. Both cases of the parentela demonstrate identical dynamics: a hegemonic political party in cooperation with a sizable trade union in an exchange-based relationship, where the insider nominates new or utilizes already existing party nominations in the civil service.

The BPS project was initially set to test the proposition that hegemonic political parties caused the parentela and then how that relationship, if found in Bulgaria, differed from that in Italy earlier. La Palombara’s hypothesis was that hegemonic parties like the DC were the main cause. That remained to be tested with the Bulgarian case. The pilot study defied this proposition, because it discovered strong evidence of party-group forms of cooperation in the presence of active competition between political parties. This indicated that the parentela might exist in competitive party systems, as opposed to predominant ones, where a single dominant party competes amidst a number of other considerably less preferred ones by the voters (as it was the case in Italy and Northern Ireland).

By the end of 2015, when final fieldwork of the BPS was completed, where the Bulgarian status quo confirmed the existence of this arrangement. The final results showed that not only La Palombara’s parentela existed, but we can also observe new parentela dynamics in addition to those discovered initially by him, labeled collectively the extended parentela (Petkov 2016, 2017). However, space allowed only for the treatment of the question how parentela relations differed between 2010s Bulgaria and 1960s Italy. The other equally important question about the implication on democracy received only cursory treatment. This book is, therefore, dedicated to that very subject and the extent to which the extended parentela can serve as a process that can bring about a consolidated oligarchic status quo in Bulgaria and in general.

In fact, the question on the relationship between the parentela and oligarchy is not new. La Palombara’s respondents confronted him with the possible connection between (alleged) Italian oligarchic practices with the parentela already back in the 1960s. While he vehemently opposed such views (1964: 314), arguing any such line of inquiry feeds conspiracy theories, the BPS does not allow us to be as dismissive. Just as La Palombara’s respondent brought up the issue, the interviewees in this study, too, defended the same view that Bulgarian policy-making is near-authoritarian, premier-centrist without a clear distinction between business and politics: in other words, oligarchic. The book argues, therefore, that the parentela in the Bulgarian context, i.e. the extended parentela, is itself oligarchic and generates an oligarchic dynamic. We can choose to see the parentela and its newly extended version simply in terms of relations between groups and political parties, but we can also choose to look at them from a macro-perspective, i.e. on the general level of state-group relations. It is the extended parentela dynamics then that serves here as the possible link to the idea of oligarchy , which La Palombara was confronted earlier....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Extended Parentela
• 2. The Parentela Through the Eyes of Bulgarian Policy-Makers
• 3. La Palombara’s Parentela in Bulgaria: The Case of Public Procurement Contracts (Public Tenders)
• 4. Type Two Parentela as an Instrument of Coercion
• 5. The Extended Parentela as a Model of Party-Centric Oligarchic Relations in Bulgaria
• 6. Ukraine Under Kuchma—An Illustration of the Link Between the Extended Parentela and Consolidated Oligarchy
• 7. The Parentela and Oligarchy
• Back Matter