Political Clientelism and Reform of Social Services Implementation in Croatia

The paper analyses the development of clientelistic practices which emerged as the consequence of reform of social services implementation in Croatia. The paper focuses on six policy areas and observes sizable diversity in the modes of policy implementation, which enabled or constrained the development of clientelistic practices in the provision of social services. The paper relies on interviews with actors involved in the policy process, official documents and statistical data to map different reform outcomes and to trace process which led to the emergence of three types of policy implementation mechanisms. These outcomes are subsequently linked with differences in the capacity of political parties to use social services for the development of partisan patronage networks. In this the paper provides the in-depth analysis of process of development of clientelistic networks across localities and policies and factors leading to it. The paper identifies two factors which affect the capacity of political parties to use reform of social policy to develop clientelistic networks. The first factor concerns the degree of institutionalization of social services provision. If social service has strongly institutionalized mechanism of implementation, with well-established organization of service provision which requires significant resources and experts, this would act as a constraint on the ability of the political parties to use implementation of services to establish clientelistic networks. The second factor that affects the development of clientelistic networks is the involvement of the actors which act as advocacy groups for the population which is the beneficiary of the policy. If the process of policy implementation includes heavy involvement of international or other advocacy groups, which sometimes also act as partners in the process of implementation of social services, this would reduce the ability of political parties to use implementation of policy to develop patronage networks.