The city government of Warsaw, a medium-sized city of less than two million inhabitants, currently consists of 779 elected politicians -- surely a world record. In 1996, Slovakia's government announced a plan to "decentralize" the state. In the space of the following two and a half months, the number of officials employed in the field administration of the state jumped from 12,000 to 19,000. Over the past ten years, the number of officials in the central administration of the Polish state has grown about three times, from 46,000 in 1990 to 125,000 in 1999.
As these examples illustrate, the process of state-building in post-Soviet Eastern Europe has been difficult even among such transition front runners as Poland and the former Czechoslovakia. Even in these best-case scenarios, the state seems to be getting bigger, less accountable, more expensive, and less efficient. Yet, this element of post-Soviet politics -- the retooling and re-deployment of bureaucracies inherited from the Soviet state -- remains relatively understudied in comparison to such other areas of state-building as constitutional design, privatization, and nationalism.
My paper will seek to explain why the state looks bigger than ever ten years after revolutions that were based in large part against a monolithic state apparatus. I will argue that this ironic outcome is the result of the intertwining of party-building and state-building. Namely, political parties use state resources to mobilize since they cannot amass sufficient resources from such traditional bases as party membership, business associations, or labor unions.
Methodologically, this argument will be tested by employing classic, case-study based comparative politics. I will look at three front runner states in Eastern Europe over the past ten years: (1) Slovakia, where the state-building dynamic has been very dramatic in terms of growth and party-capture, (2) the Czech Republic, where the process has been relatively stable by these measures, and (3) Poland, which falls somewhere between the other two cases. The evidence used in these case studies will combine process-tracing of institutional change in both party structures and bureaucratic organization, government records on employment in public administrations, government data on public finance, and field interviews conducted with politicians and state officials in the period from June through October 2000.