Modelo de aceptación de la tecnología (TAM)

Although the literature on party organizations has only marginally dealt with the practice of party patronage, for analytical purposes we can think of three different ideal types of party organizations clearly differing in the four aspects of patronage presented here. As table 2.3 shows, in the context of the cadre (or notables) party, patronage is dominated by the public office (more precisely by the notables), it is an important electoral resource in the frame of restricted democracies, and appointments are done on the basis of personal linkages (but, eventually, appointments end up creating the political ties).

Table 2.3: Patronage and models of party organization

Cadre Party Mass Party Cartel Party

Appointers Notables in Public Office

Central Office Public Office

Motivations Electoral Organizational Governmental

Appointees Personal Linkages Party Affiliation Personal Linkage Expertise

Mass parties, in contrast, suppose a central office which controls the distribution of patronage and which prioritizes the use of patronage for organizational goals, helping to sustain networks of activists on the ground and maintaining the cohesion of the party by distributing positions among different factions or tendencies. In the context of mass parties, appointees are primarily party members. Lastly, contemporary parties (either we opt for Panebianco´s professional-electoral model or Katz and Mair´s cartel) concentrate patronage powers in the hands of the party in public office, have fundamentally governmental goals related to policy-making and control of state institutions more

generally, and select appointees on the basis of a combination of expertise and personal linkages.

In regards to the Argentine case, I expect to find a complex scenario in which new elements, corresponding to the model of the cartel party, coexist with traditional ones. First, the scope of political appointments has always been considered to be broad in this country, which never developed bureaucratic autonomy and whose state has historically been subject to political colonization (Rock, 2005; Ferraro, 2006). As a matter of fact, there is a strong tendency among political scientists to present the whole Argentine state apparatus as colonized by parties (Calvo and Murillo, 2004; Remmer, 2007). However, I expect to find variations in the reach of party patronage across the Argentine state. It is my expectation that strategic political decisions intended to improve the performance of a few sensitive areas of the state have led to the professionalization of parts of the Argentine state bureaucracy, especially at the national level. In addition, I expect other actors apart from parties to take part in “patronage games”, participating in the process of appointing people to state positions.

I also expect the party in public office to be the dominant face in the processes of distribution of patronage. Actually, the central offices of Argentine parties, especially in the case of the PJ, have usually been subordinated to those party politicians who hold public positions. Yet, it is my expectation in this regard that the personalization of electoral competition and the de-institutionalization of parties (Scherlis, 2008a) have led to the strengthening of executive elected leaders (president and governors) at times of appointing state personnel, to the detriment of the parties´ bureaucratic structures. Moreover, I expect the patronage powers of the party in public office to be decisive in strengthening that face of the party to the detriment of an autonomous party in central office.

In terms of motivations, according to the changes in the patterns of party competition described in chapter 1, I expect patronage to be increasingly motivated by the need to get tight control over bureaucratic structures to dominate complex processes of policy-making. Surely, patronage is still employed as an incentive to obtain political allegiance and, particularly at the provincial level, to recruit and maintain networks of activists. As Andrés Malamud says, “… in provinces in which forty per cent of the population is poor and the income is extremely unequal, political demands will look more like those of clients than like those of citizens” (Malamud, 2008:163). It is to be expected that ruling parties in the provinces make use of state jobs in a clientelistic manner. But it is also my expectation that parties at the national level will be less interested in using jobs to form large patronage networks on the ground and more interested in controlling the state machinery so as to dominate the process of policy- making and implementation and the financial and organizational resources involved in that process. Besides, I expect that in a context of party fragmentation and de- institutionalization, the ability to appoint people to state positions works as a mechanism to forge governmental coalitions.

Lastly, with regard to the criteria for the selection of the appointees, I expect to find that party affiliation is, as a result of the process of party de-institutionalization, a declining factor. In contrast, I expect to see that personal linkages and expertise emerge as increasingly important criteria. At this point my expectations differ with regard to national and sub-national levels. Partisanship is expected to be meaningless at the national level, but still of some importance in some provinces, where the process of party de-institutionalization is relatively less visible (Malamud and De Luca, 2005; Calvo and Escolar, 2005) and where party organizations may still conserve adherents and members which constitute a reservoir of potential appointees. All in all, however,

the general expectation in this regard is that “responsive competence” (Suleiman, 2003:215), understood as a combination of personal trust and expertise, has become the common denominator for appointments.

Having now defined the lines along which party patronage will be observed and the expectations with which the research starts, I describe in the next chapter the specific methodology employed in this dissertation to study party patronage in Argentina.

CHAPTER 3