How do Political Parties Survive without Organizational Resources in New Democracies: Tactics of Politicization of the Local Administration in Romanian Cities

Politicization of the administration has been widely researched across various strands from executive politics, to party politics and public administration and political economy. However, in a democratizing context where party building precedes state building, there is little understanding from such literature on why some political parties use more party patronage and state resources in order to outcompete electorally than others. The analytical lens on how party building process affects political hiring and firing in administration in new democracies has been a missing lens and therefore, even less is known on what incentivizes parties in a multi-level setting to politicise differently the local level of the public administration. Therefore, this article asks why do some incumbent parties hire and fire more at the local level than others. In contrast to most of literature, that has focused on political competition, we argue that variation in levels of politicization is explained by political parties' organizational resource scarcity. In other words, in the party building process parties with more organizational resources tend to be less dependent on state resources and therefore use less political loyalists in order to survive organizationally, hence explaining lower levels of politicization in local administration. In contrast, parties with scarce organizational resources use the state administration as an organizational resource and therefore level of politicization increase. We measure political hiring and firing through number of political appointees, temporary contracts, turnover of civil servants after change of political party in power. In order to test our theory, we employ logistical regression on an original dataset of approximately 300 largest cities in Romania.