Oligarchic Party-Group Relations in Bulgaria

This chapter introduces the parentela policy network model as a party-group relationship format discovered by Joseph La Palombara in 1960s Italy. It is a relationship, where a group with a party insider status extends its influence into the Civil Service thanks to party’s interference in the Bureaucracy, usually through political appointments. The Introduction discusses the definition of the parentela policy network and presents the latest theoretical advances into the model following the recent Bulgarian Parentela Study (BPS) of mid-2010s. Accordingly, the present chapter introduces prejudiced regulatory inspections, as a novel parentela element. The chapter argues that both La Palombara’s original and the newly discovered dynamics, dubbed type one and type two parentela respectively, constitute a model of an oligarchic dynamic, which will be gradually developed throughout the book, where in Chapter 5, in particular will express a hypothesis that follows from those dynamics. The Introduction also features a short methodological discussion.

This chapter reveals the first method used in the detection of La Palombara’s parentela in Bulgaria. These are the 26 anonymous elite interviews with Bulgarian policy-makers. Note that the Appendix features a few useful tables and figures which can help us appreciate better the interview responses. The parentela was discovered, so to speak, by overlapping the interview responses which are supposed to describe it (the network descriptors). While we can safely say that the described party-group dynamic by the Bulgarian interviewees corresponds to the parentela, we are faced with the question of the utility of this approach.

The previous chapter argued that the parentela was observable in the data from the 26 elite interviews, although it also acknowledged that a stronger proof the parentela could come from a discussion of a typical case. In this chapter we discuss again the parentela relations, but this time in the context of the dynamics surrounding the distribution of public procurement contracts, also known as public tenders. These are contracts between the state and private companies for the provision of public goods or services. In this typical case, the chapter reveals the parentela as the process through which the ruling party interferes in the work of the civil service, so that the party insider is awarded the public tender. The fact that we find the parentela in non-policy-making, involving single businesses, suggests that the parentela is part of a wider dynamic, which is revealed in Chapter 5.

This chapter is dedicated to the new dynamic discovered in the BPS. If the original parentela was about the party in power interfering in the civil service (in the interest of its party-insider) by means of political appointments, patronage in this case is used to mobilize the regulatory agencies to behave with party’s interest in mind. Labeled as prejudiced regulatory inspections (PRI) or type two parentela, the study discovered that under the pretext of routine inspections of the regulatory agencies, select businesses are targeted for disruption and disablement. The chapter discusses four applications of PRIs: as a mean of extortion, as an instrument to overcome one’s market competition and as an instrument to pressure political dissenters inside or out of ruling party.

This chapter is dedicated to the term “extended parentela” which stands for the model of oligarchic party-group dynamics currently in operation in Bulgaria. If the previous chapters were used to present the results of the Bulgarian Parentela Study, then they also served to introduce the two elements that comprise this model: type one and type two parentela. The argument here is that from a macro-political perspective, the parentela assumes the outlines of an oligarchic dynamic because it models the competition among oligarchic elites formed around party-group cooperation. The present chapter will construct the extended parentela model and explain why it is oligarchic and hypothesize on Bulgarian democratic development. In doing so, the chapter also argues that the model could serve as the theoretical mechanism of a state’s departure from a democratic status quo to oligarchic, without reforming any of the existing democratic institutions.

The previous chapter focused on the development of the extended parentela as a model of oligarchic dynamics in Bulgaria. It ended with the hypothesis that if the extended parentela dynamic is left unchecked and in combination with parliamentary elections, the internal state-group dynamics can transform into a consolidated oligarchy. What is meant with this term is not that the Bulgarian state will formally become an oligarchy. Rather, that the competition among elites will cease and they will solidify into a single, coherent elitist community: either because there will be only one party, or because all parties will decide to govern together. In any case, there is the question whether all of the above is valid because it was developed on a high level of abstraction. Is it applicable to a case outside Bulgaria, or is it purely a Bulgarian phenomenon? To answer this question, the present chapter focuses on the secondary literature produced by area experts on Ukraine specifically under President Kuchma’s tenure. The objective is to find traces of the extended parentela model and the hypothesized causal dynamic: the extended parentela, suppression of political competition and evidence of oligarchic consolidation. The present chapter argues that we can find all of these elements in the Ukrainian case and therefore the extended parentela model is at least tentatively validated.

This chapter reviews the novelties which the present volume brings to the parentela model. The chapter argues therefore that the extended parentela has an application in the field of democracy and democratic transition because it has the potential to explain forms of transitions not towards to democracy but away from it. The model elucidates that formal democratic institutions can harbour non-democratic dynamics, partcularly the transition from biased pluralist or oligarchic dynamics into a consolidated oligarchic status quo. (Whether the starting point of the transformation is pluralism or the oligarchic dynamics of the extended parentela depends on where we stand in the debate on their mutual discreteness).