This paper argues that the institutionalization of particularism within governing parties is central to explain whether formerly hybrid regimes transform to functioning polyarchies – or to mere semblances of it. It thereby departs from the hypothesis that the party internal setup matters to whether and how its party leaderships, once they form cabinets engage in patronage towards institutions of horizontal control.
It seeks to add to the alleviation of conceptual and methodological problems of patronage on two levels. Firstly, it explains party-internal particularism as the consequence of certain institutional party-internal set-ups. It conceptualizes party-internal rules by (1) the degree of power accumulation at the presidential position (2) a unmanipulated chain of delegation from local party organizations to the party leadership and (3) the openness of competition for leadership positions according to the incumbents’ success rate, the likelihood of contests and the number of candidates (Kenig 2009).
Secondly, this paper connects this party-internal setup to the particularism used by governing politicians and proposes a measurement method that assesses the effects of particularism measuring the distance of policy positions between politicians on the one side and control institutions (constitutional, supreme and administrative courts as well as public media) on the other. This approach rests on the observation that policy distance between principals and supervisors varies in polyarchies where these institutions regularly contradict government politicians. When the policy distance over time is consistently small as reflected in a systematic absence of criticism, a particularistic principal-agent relationship can be assumed.
