Grzymala-Busse Anna. Rebuilding Leviathan

Cambridge University Press, 2007. — 294 p.Why do some governing parties limit their opportunistic behavior and constrain the extraction of private gains from the state? The analysis of post-communist state reconstruction provides surprising answers to this fundamental question of party politics. Across the post-communist democracies, governing parties have opportunistically reconstructed the state – simultaneously exploiting it by extracting state resources and building new institutions that further such extraction. They enfeebled or delayed formal state institutions of monitoring and oversight, established new discretionary structures of state administration, and extracted enormous informal profits from the privatization of the communist economy.
Yet there is also enormous variation in these processes across the postcommunist democracies of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Party competition is responsible – specifically, the more robust the competition, the more the governing parties faced a credible threat of replacement and the more they curbed exploitation by building formal barriers, moderating their own behavior and sharing power with the opposition.
Anna Grzymal a-Busse is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She previously taught at Yale University. Her first book, Redeeming the Communist Past, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2002. She has also published articles in Comparative Political Studies, Comparative Politics, East European Politics and Societies, Party Politics, Politics and Society, and other journals."Following her successful book on successor Communist parties in Eastern Europe, Anna Grzymala-Busse, in Rebuilding Leviathan, examines the impact of party competition on state building. Although market economies and electoral democracies are pervasive in the region, the record of state-building is mixed. In her original and well-researched study, Grymala-Busse argues that the variation can be explained by the degree of "robust" competition between political parties--that is, whether opposition parties are distinct, provide a plausible governing alternative, and are effective critics. She provides an effective critique both of those who dismiss the impact of party competition on institution building and those who miss the nuances of real-world party politics. Robust competition can persuade incumbents to create independent oversight bodies, limit clientalistic behavior, and control rent-seeking by public officials. In spite of its regional focus, the lessons of Rebuilding Leviathan will be of great interest to students of state reform and democratic transition throughout the world, especially in the middle-income countries of Latin American and Asia, where party competition is of increasing importance."
Susan Rose-Ackerman, Yale University