3. Absorption of EU Funds in a Post-communist and Post-accession Context

These aspects are at the same time also important in some old member states (see the conclusion for a further discussion).

In contrast to patronage as an electoral resource and a distinct party-voter linkage strategy (Kitschelt and Wilkinson 2007: 7).

The selection of the SGI ‘executive capacity’ indicator is discussed in greater detail in Sect. 4.​4.

Minor exceptions are block parties such as the Polish PSL (Bingen 2008: 81).

The phenomenon of weakening party-society linkages and parties’ subsequent turn to the state for resources is also stressed as a development in West European party systems (Katz and Mair 1995). Still, these parties have most often still strong organizational legacies from their time as mass parties, and tend to seek support through official state party finance, resulting rather in “inter-party collusion” (Katz and Mair 2009: 755). In contrast, the presence of a delegitimized state, a strongly antagonizing party competition, and the necessity to build parties from scratch make extensive party politicization and patronage in the post-communist region much more likely and intense. I agree that the phenomenon can be studied for Europe as a whole (see also the conclusion on this), but I argue that the communist legacy makes the CEE countries especially prone to this practice, a fact which is also underlined by the comparative findings gathered in studies taking a European perspective (where no CEE country is below the European average of politicization) (Kopecký and Mair 2012a: 367).

This finding is supported by other studies that find that funding increases with congruence between the leading regional party and the leading national party (Chalmers 2013: 826). In their analysis of sub-state governments in Germany, Dellmuth and Stoffel found that “there is robust and strong evidence that recipient sub-state governments provide more funds to districts […] in which they already have high electoral support” (Dellmuth and Stoffel 2012: 427, and also a high turnout, according to Schraff 2014: 286 working with the same data). In Italy, the regional governments of Abruzzo and Puglia were found “to allocate funds with an eye to the electoral return that they may bring” (Piattoni and Smyrl 2003: 144–145). In a similar vein, other studies found also a positive effect in the allocation of funds for regions with many swing voters (Bodenstein and Kemmerling 2011: 17; similar Bouvet and Dall’Erba 2010, but see Dellmuth 2011: 1029). Still, these studies never report ‘all-or-nothing’-fundamental changes upon the advent of a new government in office.

Support for the assumed importance of the occurrence of politicization in contrast to its presence as a phenomenon is also stressed in different studies. While political changes go hand in hand with low absorption levels, this is not necessarily confirmed for party politicization (Buzogány and Korkut 2013: 1558) or even corruption per se (Beugelsdijk and Eijffinger 2005: 50). Use of funds with an eye on the electoral return can work well if the focus is not too narrowly on a few particularistic groups (Piattoni and Smyrl 2003: 145). Evidence for Poland suggests that ‘bonding social capital’, that is the rather inward-looking type of social capital focussing on one’s own kinship (in contrast to generalized trust in the society), is beneficial for a stringent absorption of funds (Lackowska-Madurowicz and Swianiewicz 2013: 1410). Thus, it is most likely rather the competition of special interests, in contrast to their existence causing absorption problems.

PHARE stands for ‘Poland and Hungary: Assistance for Restructuring their Economies’ (Beichelt 2004: 40).

NUTS refers to the ‘Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics’, thus the subdivision of member states into smaller units, for example for purposes of fund allocation.

ISPA and PHARE combined, 2000–2006 period.

For example, the Lithuanian Labour Party, a populist newcomer, tried to alter the countries’ management and control system for the 2007–2013 financing period in order to have complete control over programme implementation at the level of the ministries it controlled at that time. Still, an insider from the centralized MA in Lithuania stressed that when the Labour Party tried to push for this decentralization “we convinced them that they are not able to do that” (LT4 2014).

They are set for member states whose GDP per capita was below 85% of the EU 25 average between 2001 and 2003 at 85% for both the structural funds as well as the cohesion fund, and for both the convergence and the competitiveness and employment objective (Annex III to Council Regulation (General Regulation)). This provision includes all central and eastern European member states as well as Greece, Cyprus, Malta, and Portugal.

On such use of social policies see similar ‘Compensation as a Government Tactic’ as presented by Greskovits (1998: 137–154) or ‘Strategic Social Policies’ by Vanhuysse (2006: 136).

“INUS conditions are […] neither individually necessary nor individually sufficient for an outcome of interest. Instead, they are essential (i.e. non-redundant) components of an overall configuration of variable values that is sufficient for the outcome” (Mahoney and Goertz 2006: 24–25).