Patronage is not produced by political parties acting as unitary actors. It is rather prompted by political entrepreneurs that thrive inside the two major parties, which, despite their commonly loose organizational structures and blurred ideological positions, are destined to alternate in office. A two-way logic seems to develop: the parties need those entrepreneurs who, through developing patronage networks, bring in voters, and the political entrepreneurs need the parties, especially when in office, for offering them access to state-related spoils. There is, however, an unintended consequence.

1. Political patronage and the state in Albania during last decade
Among every major crisis in Albania, political or economic ones, the political patronage
undoubtedly topped the list. For more than two decades, political parties had enjoyed the
power to appoint individuals to positions in the public sector, with two ominous long-term
consequences: the excessive growth of the country’s civil service and the continuous increase
of the public sector wage bill.
When substituting ‘state’ with ‘party in office’ we feel that we get an apt description of the
workings of political patronage. Although patronage has been a permanent feature of not only
Albanian politics since the transition to party democracy, it became particularly pronounced
during the last decade and, since then, continued intensifying.
Political patronage has been a time-honored feature of Albanian’s political system. In this
regard we have to distinguish between “traditional clientelism” and “machine politics”, in
which ‘the political loyalty and identification of voters benefits the party as such, rather than
individual politicians’.
In the last decade the politics, has introduced the so called “meritocracy clientelism” to
convince all parties about patronage that ‘consists of systematic infiltration of the state
machine by party devotees and the allocation of favors through it [and] characterized by an
organized expansion of posts and departments in the public sector and the addition of new
ones in an attempt to secure power and maintain a party’s electoral base.
Ever since Albania’s transition to pluralist politics in 1990, parties have played crucial roles in
organizing the public space, aggregating social demands, socializing the citizens, and, in short,
creating what has been termed a “party democracy”. The major parties that emerged in the
new pluralist environment were the center-right Democratic Party (PD) and the center-left
Socialist Party (PS).
The turning point was the elections of 1992, which PD won the administrative election,
thereafter creating the conditions for two decades of almost uninterrupted rule of the same
spirit of “doing the state” based in their slogans.
That election also signified the transformation of the party system that had existed in Albania
for four decades into a classic two-party system (which represented the two wings of political
ideologies) that is, a system in which “the existence of third parties does not prevent the two
major parties from governing alone, i.e. whenever coalitions are unnecessary”.
The predominance of parties, in conjunction with the solidification of two-partyism, has given
rise in last decade to political polarization, which often peaks around election times. Political
competition thus often takes the form of a near zero-sum game between the two rival parties
over the spoils to be gained from capturing the state.

2. Polarized competition in a two-party system is, of course, only one side of the patronage coin;
the other side is statism, that is, the expansion of the state in all areas of public life, which thus
becomes “a major aspect of Albanian political culture, not only as an ideology and practice, but
also as a core social expectation”.
A tradition of state centralism, the large size of public administration and its extensive control
over key sectors of the national economy, the overt politicization of its functions and the lack of
autonomy of the bureaucracy, becomes the technical staff during the years subordinated to
political authority.
State centralism, first, has deeply affected by politics which, to this date, is characterized by
centralism, bureaucratization, and legalism.
Second, with regard to size, the state is the only employer which offers employment, whether
on a permanent or temporary basis, to approximately 150.000 individuals. Besides being the
largest employer, the state has always aimed at asserting economic control over strategic
sectors of the economy.
Such state expansion has slowed down a bit, when privatizations were initiated. Even so, to this
date “government control on public corporations remains the heart of the matter”.
The third characteristic of the Albania state is the predominance of party political loyalty rather
than individual merit for both recruitment and promotion in the civil service hierarchy. Every
public central institution has an overabundance of political appointees who aid the top
managers and who supervise and, at times, supplant top civil servants.
The fourth characteristic of the state is the bureaucracy’s lack of autonomy and its subservience
to political elites. A wave of creating “independent authorities” that began in the 1990s and
continued into the following decade was intended precisely to reinvigorate the status of the
civil service vis-à-vis central political authority.
Under pressure from their own electorates for precious state jobs and other state-related
benefits, and despite an effort towards state reform through privatizations, party patronage
remained the order of the day.
In 2013, when socialist wing once again returned to power, it had become quite obvious to
everybody that patronage had got out of hand and that it should be contained. This led the
government to establish a set of legal rules and institution intended to be the watchdog over
the hiring of civil service staff.
But, let’s see the scope of patronage, which may be further analyzed as range (i.e. the number
of institutions affected by it) and depth (i.e. the number of levels within each institution
permeated by patronage).

3. Within the ministerial level, first, at top level all positions are distributed through political
appointment. Still remaining at top level, the vast majority of state corporation directors, chief
executives, and boards of directors are all direct political appointments. All such top
management positions are in the full discretion of the government and filled upon political
criteria. There are only a few but important exceptions, of which the most important is perhaps
the appointment of the heads of the ‘independent’ and regulatory authorities, which are
decided by the Parliament. The fact that those appointments are made after at least the two
major parties have reached consensus ensures their nonpartisan character. It is not unusual,
however, that governments try to sidestep those criteria and promote to top positions
individuals who are politically friendlier to them.
Personnel appointment procedures at the middle and bottom levels within either the
ministerial or the extra-ministerial domains are remarkably similar. At middle level, first,
although most posts are earned through regular advancement within the civil service hierarchy,
personnel selection on the basis of party affiliation is also fairly common. Civil service personnel
at this level include directors and heads of sections. Promotion to the post of director general
depends on the decision of a council, permanently seated at the Department of Public
Administration (DPA).
Evidently, in what appears to be common practice, ‘by appointing friendly directors to the
council of the minister can influence the selection of heads of directorates and of sections in
the public central institutions.
At the state’s bottom level, and in the absence of unified legislation, personnel is distinguished
into two categories, tenured and contracted. Tenured staff includes those occupying organic
positions in the public administration (including the local government). According to the Civil
Service Law, the recruitment of such personnel is based on yearly programming by the DPA and
depends on successful performance in written nationwide examinations supervised by DPA. In
parallel, however, there are also a large number of contract employees, who are hired on
looser procedures and criteria, and often claim their incorporation into the permanent public
workforce.
Contract employees are further distinguished into three specific categories: employees on
renewable fixed-term contracts; employees with work contracts lasting for the duration of
specific projects; and seasonal workers. Most, if not all, of these categories enter the state
through party patronage channels.
At the middle level of state administration, thanks to a rigid system of hierarchical promotions
along public sector ranks, the demand for patronage to specific social categories becomes
stronger. Typically at this level, state employees seek two things: first to climb the ladder of
hierarchy in as fast and unobstructed a way as possible and, second, to get transferred across
administration departments or sectors, whether temporarily or permanently, to positions with
better working conditions and higher remuneration.

4. Patronage, furthermore, has to be understood in relation to three structural characteristics of
the post-authoritarian Albanian political system:
(a) the predominance of parties in the polity and the creation since 1990 of a two-party system
in which the significant parties have regularly alternated in office
(b) the intense polarization of political competition that has been used by the major parties in
order to both rally their supporters and, once in power, fully exploit the state resources
(c) the politicization of the civil service, in conjunction with its lack of autonomy from party
political authority.
To the extent that parties dominate a winner-takes-all political system, the state is up for grabs
by the party that wins elections and the spoils ready to be distributed to party supporters,
voters, and other affiliates.
Patronage is particularly evident at the bottom and top ends of the public administration area,
but also flourishes at the middle level in the form of preferential intrastate transfers.
As successive governments have brought into the state new masses of employees on the basis
of party patronage criteria, the state has come to look like a sedimentary rock, each layer of
which represents a particular “geological” period.
Patronage is not produced by political parties acting as unitary actors. It is rather prompted by
political entrepreneurs that thrive inside the two major parties, which, despite their commonly
loose organizational structures and blurred ideological positions, are destined to alternate in
office. A two-way logic seems to develop: the parties need those entrepreneurs who, through
developing patronage networks, bring in voters, and the political entrepreneurs need the
parties, especially when in office, for offering them access to state-related spoils. There is,
however, an unintended consequence.
Party entrepreneurs in both of the major parties may exercise as strong an opposition to same-
party fellow politicians as to the adversary party. As for the smaller parties, they take part in
patronage politics only in some sectors or in proportion to the strength of the unions that
represent them.