Entrenched Parties and Control of Public Procurement Processes

Do entrenched parties take advantage of their position at the expense of public good? This paper asks if low political competition is associated with manipulation of public procurement processes. Using unique Swedish sub-national data from 2009 to 2015 it demonstrates that when one party dominates local politics, procurement processes show clear signs of concern. Most striking is that the risk for getting only one bid on what is intended to be an open tender considerably increases with one-party-rule. Moreover, the paper reports that entrenched party rule is associated with less well functioning internal and external control mechanisms: the local bureaucracy is less educated, the municipal audits are more prone to be influenced by the ruling majority, and local politicians are less susceptible to media pressure. These results are particularly interesting from a comparative perspective since Sweden, being an old democracy with low levels of corruption and clientelism, and with a highly institutionalized party-system dominated by programmatic linkage strategies, is an unlikely case in which to find these tendencies.