This Research Note presents a new dataset of party patronage in 22 countries from five regions. The data was collected based on the same methodology to compare patterns of patronage within countries, across countries and across world regions that are usually studied separately. The Note addresses three research questions that are at the center of debates on party patronage, which is understood as the power of political parties to make appointments to the public and semi-public sector: the scope of patronage, the underlying motivations, and the criteria on the basis of which appointees are selected. The exploration of the dataset shows that party patronage is, to a different degree, widespread across all regions. . The data further shows differences between policy areas, types of institutions such as government ministries, agencies and state-owned enterprises, and higher, middle and lower ranks of the bureaucracy. It is demonstrated that the political control of policy-making and implementation is the most common motivation for making political appointments. However, in countries with a large scope of patronage, appointments serve the purpose of both political control and rewarding supporters in exchange for votes and services. Finally, the data shows that parties prefer to select appointees who are characterized by political and personal loyalty as well as professional competence.

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The article provides an analysis of the evolution of the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP) from a Marxist party in the late 1980s into a European socialist party by the early 2000s. The BSP dominance of the political process in Bulgaria during the early and mid-1990s can be attributed, this article argues, to several factors: the nature of the old regime, the absence of any meaningful opposition before 1989 and its relative weakness during the transition period, the crucial role that the Bulgarian Communist Party (BKP) played in the transition to democracy, and the organizational continuity that the newly renamed BSP chose to maintain. In turn, the preserved dominance of the BSP allowed it to remain relatively unreformed in terms of economic and foreign policy positions. It was only after its devastating defeat in the 1997 elections that the BSP came to advocate a truly social-democratic platform and to support a pro-EU and pro-NATO foreign policy. This ideological transformation of the BSP was supported and encouraged actively by the Party of European Socialists, which has been deeply involved in the process of strengthening the social democracy in Bulgaria since the mid-1990s. As a result of this transformation, by 2008 the BSP is recognized as a democratic, center-left party.

Much has been written about what makes political parties form, persist, change and die. One factor often brought into this discussion is the availability of resources in general and of state financing of political parties in particular. However, an empirical link at the aggregate level is difficult to establish because of various issues of conceptualization, operationalization and measurement. Working at the party level and taking into consideration that state funding provides important resources that make running in elections and achieving a party’s electoral target more likely, this article provides empirical support for the claim that parties who (anticipate to be or) are being funded by the state have a higher chance of forming and surviving in an independent format in the party system. Based on a comparison of 14 post-communist party systems, the main conclusion of the article is that the survival rate for such parties exceeds the survival rate for the non-publicly funded ones in almost all cases. A second, novel and more particular, finding is that parties who find themselves outside parliament, but above the payout threshold, display higher survival rates than parties who are below it.

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