ABSTRACT
While much has been written about the relationship of post-communist civil
societies to the state, only recently has scholarship begun to examine the
links between parties and the state.1 The lack of literature in this area is sur-
prising given, as Ganev argues, that the ‘symbiosis of party and state was argu-
ably the most important feature of communist political systems in Eastern
Europe’.2 Perhaps one of the reasons this relationship has not been more
studied is the difficulty of operationalizing appropriate measures. While
terms such as ‘state capture’ and ‘clientelism’ have been used to describe
the party-state relationship, empirical measures for these phenomena are dif-
ficult to establish. However, this is an important literature for scholars to
engage with, as it raises the question of whether the politicization of the
state is a function of such issues as regime legacy, the provision of state
public goods, the structure of state incentives or the distribution of party power
in parliament.3
