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Rethinking Clientelism, Governance and Citizenship in Social Welfare: the case of Croatia

Recent work on ‘clientelism’ has sought to address the concept in terms of a broad set of practices in the context of asymmetrical distributional, governance and citizenship relations. Social welfare has, increasingly, been seen as a key site of clientelism in which claims making, akin to the capturing of institutions, resources and services by certain groups, is traded for the political advantage of particular elites (Roniger, 2004). The concept of clientelism has been used by Ferrera (1994) in order to explain the specificities of the Southern European welfare model and clientelist-particularistic relations has been seen as one of the core features, along with religion and the role of the family, in the ‘extended family’ of Mediterranean welfare states (Gal, 2010). Studies of post-communist transformations have been dominated by two paradigms: one focusing on path-dependent internal features and the other on processes of globalisation and Europeanisation, neither of which are sufficient to explain all the features of post-communist welfare transformations, especially in countries marked by a slow and delayed Europeanization. Taking Croatia as a case study, marked as it is by a quite peculiar configuration of Bismarckian, post-communist, and post-conflict legacies, this paper seeks to address clientelism as a set of complex, changing and contested politicised projects, through which social policy is subject to competing and contradictory tendencies in the context of war, new nation state building, and populist authoritarian political tendencies. In a political environment in which power struggles within the ruling party have been as important as externally driven reforms, the paper explores the nature of captured and categorical distributional effects, the dominance of nationality over territorial-based citizenship claims, and the politicisation of the nature and scale of governance The privileging of the rights of war veterans, those of Croatian ethnicity and those with linkages to the ruling party are addressed in the context of competing reform discourses of universalism and rights, on the one hand, and targeting and economic efficiency, on the other.

clientelism; social welfare; Croatia

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