Criminal Networks Capturing the State: The case of Controlled Voting and Vote Buying in Bulgaria

Contemporary Bulgarian democracy faces diverse issues with democratic representation and legitimacy as well as fluidity of the party system. In the last 25 years we have witnessed excess levels of electoral volatility (especially in 2001 and 2009), marking critical elections that transformed the party system; and fragmentation of the party system marked by the growing effective number of parties. Mainstream political science explains this fluidity with a crisis of political identification and collapse of trust in political parties among other political institutions, together with increased critical attitudes arising from economic hardships. Yet, another explanation is the growing number of controlled voting and direct vote buying which flourishes in recent years despite its criminalization and the intensive policymaking on the issue. The corpus of specialized legislation and the firm codification of the electoral process proved fruitless in limiting the share of controlled votes in the overall turnout. The expansion of the weight of controlled votes in the election results increased the demand for paid votes thus creating a well-developed market for votes controlled by criminal agents who diversify their portfolio of criminal activities. This market is organized by criminal networks connecting underground figures with politicians, judges, prosecutors, local authorities and businesses. The ground for its expansion is the growing social marginalization of greater number of subgroups and local communities.