How Personalist Parties Undermine State Capacity in Democracies

• Published date: 01 November 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00104140231169014
• Author: Jia Li,Joseph Wright
• Date: 01 November 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Comparative Political Studies

2023, Vol. 56(13) 2030–2065

© The Author(s) 2023

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DOI: 10.1177/00104140231169014

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How Personalist Parties

Undermine State

Capacity in Democracies

Jia Li

1

and Joseph Wright

2

Abstract

How do political parties shape state capacity? We argue that democratic

leaders backed by personalist parties are more likely than other leaders to

undermine impartial state administration. Personalist parties are those where

the leader has more control over the party than other senior party elites.

Elites in these parties have careers closely tied to the leader, are unlikely to

normatively value an impersonal bureaucracy, and lack collective action

capacity independent from the leader. Therefore, personalist parties are less

likely than other parties to restrain leaders from undermining impartial state

administration. Results from various designs for causal inference show that

party personalism decreases impersonal state administration, particularly

when the party controls a legislative majority. However, party personalism

does not inf‌luence other dimensions of state capacity, such as f‌iscal capacity or

territorial control. The f‌indings have implications for how political parties

enable democratically elected leaders to erode open-access societies and

ultimately, democracy.

Keywords

political parties, democracy, personalism, state capacity, impartial bureaucracy

1

Utah State University, Logan, UT, USA

2

Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Jia Li, Utah State University, Department of Political Science, 0725 Old Main Hill, Logan, UT

84322-0725, USA.

Email: jiali.polisci@gmail.com

Even before the unsuccessful coup attempt in the summer of 2016 in Turkey,

President Erdo ˘

gan’s party, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), attacked

the Turkish state bureaucracy because it threatened his hold on power. Indeed

the largely secular state had set a precedent, orchestrating the fall of an earlier

government led by an Islamic party in 1997, four years prior to the AKP’s

foundingin 2001. Beginning with his own party,Erdo˘

gan consolidatedpersonal

power and thenproceeded to undermine the statebureaucracy (Lancaster,2014,

1682–83). His attacks on the state included targets such as government min-

istries, internalintelligence agencies, the legislature,the judiciary, and even the

central bank (Demiralp & Demiralp, 2019). In the wake of the 2016 coup

attempt, Erdo˘

gan’s government dismissed or detained perhaps as many as

100,000 public sector employees (Amnesty International, 2017,4).

A similar storyhas unfolded in Hungary in the past decade.After Fidesz won

parliamentaryelections in 2010, the leaderof the victorious party,Viktor Orb´

an,

began attackingthe institutions of the state. Shortly aftercoming to power, “the

Orb´

an administration[introduced] laws that havemade the immediate dismissal

of public employees without cause possible, and so, too, the cleansing of the

entire governmentapparatus. As a result, centraland local public administration

[were] quickly politicized”(Bozóki, 2011, 11). Indeed, after the 2010 election,

“the top four hierarchical levels of centralgovernment bureaucracy were almost

entirely purged,”cementing Orb´

an’s power over the state (Hajnal & Boda,

2021, 81). In the process, “[Orb´

an] has…made the public sector less ac-

countableto citizens”(Comelli & Horv´

ath, 2018). Andperhaps most pernicious

for impartialstate administration, Orb´

an’s“partyhas quietly taken controlof the

boards that run many state institutions”to hedge against the possibility that

Fidesz loses its legislative super-majority (Roth, 2021). Orb´

an “is creating

foundations run by cronies that will control many state resources and operate

beyond the oversight of the legislature”(Roth, 2021).

Erdo˘

gan and Orb´

an were f‌irst elected in free and fair elections under

democratic rule; and both quickly took aim at the state bureaucracy in the

process consolidating their hold on power. However, even prior to politicizing

the state, these leaders took control over the political party that launched their

electoral careers, a process we refer to as personalizing their parties. Con-

sequently, the personalized parties that backed these rulers proved unable to

restrain their subsequent attacks on the state. Indeed, personalist parties were

central to the process of eroding impartial state administration and consoli-

dating the leader’s power over the state.

This paper asks how personalized political parties shape impartial state

administrative and bureaucratic capacity in democracies. We argue that

leaders backed by personalist parties undermine and politicize the state bu-

reaucracy in an effort to consolidate power. All political leaders—those

backed by personalist parties and those who lead non-personalized

parties—have an incentive to politically align state bureaucracies with

Li and Wright 2031

their policy priorities, to both help solve delegation problems and reduce

bureaucratic constraints on their power. Politicizing the bureaucracy reduces

state capacity, conceptualized as an impartial and impersonal administrative

bureaucracy.

Parties where elites have better career prospects independent of the current

leader restrain incumbents from politicizing the state because their careers

depend more on the established, non-personalist party and its reputation,

rather than on the current leader. Thus, they are more likely to pay future

policy and electoral costs for politicizing the bureaucracy well after the current

leader leaves off‌ice. In contrast, when leaders are backed by personalist

parties, rulers select loyal elites with career fates tied to the leader, which

aligns personalist party elites’interests with their leader’s political career. And

even if elites in personalist parties want to stop the leader’s politicization of the

state bureaucracy, they may not have the collective action capacity to prevent

the leader from doing so. Together, the leaders’incentive to undermine

impartial state administration and party elites’lack of incentive or inability to

stop this process mean that leaders backed by personalist parties should be

more likely to politicize state bureaucracies than leaders who are not backed

by personalist parties.

However, all leaders, even those backed by personalist parties, still require

revenue from the economy to sustain their rule and prefer control over the

state’s territory. They thus do not necessarily have an incentive to harm state

f‌iscal capacity or the territorial reach and power of the state. Since Fidesz took

power in 2010, Hungary saw no signif‌icant reduction in its public revenue

relative to the size of its economy (World Bank, 2022). While Orb´

an used pre-

election f‌iscal handouts to boost its popular support (Szakacs, 2022), his

government looked for new revenues from tax increase on small businesses to

new windfall taxes on big ones (Dunai, 2022;France-Presse, 2022). In

Turkey,Erdo ˘

gan’s government asserted territorial control over its borders with

growing repression against its Kurdish population (Butler, 2021) as well as

military attacks on Kurds in Syria and Iraq (Burc, 2019;Jongerden, 2019).

These cases suggest that personalist parties may undermine impersonal ad-

ministrative and bureaucratic capacity without necessarily hindering other

components of state capacity.

State bureaucraticcapacity has been linked to better development outcomes

(e.g., Evans & Rauch, 1999) and long-term economic growth and investment

(e.g., Besley & Persson, 2010;Knack & Keefer, 1995;Knutsen, 2013)aswell

as public service delivery essential for boosting health and education and re-

ducing poverty (e.g., Cingolani et al., 2015;Hanson, 2015;Henderson et al.,

2007). Others note that bureaucratic quality enables “developmental states”to

enact coherent growth-oriented policies (e.g., Johnson, 1982) and provides

states with more policy options for dealing with macro-economic volatility

(e.g., Franco Chuaire et al., 2017;Haggard & Kaufman, 1992). Further, state

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