Informal connections in political and economic spheres in Serbia

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate on the importance of informal connections between the politics and the economy in Serbia after the year 2000. The main idea which leads us is that there are obvious and numerous irregularities in individuals’ behaviors toward legally established rules and that unwritten rules and practices exist in the political field. Those informal prescriptions of actions are dictated by functional requirements of social system in which economic and political players act as rational actors in a specific context of the post socialist state. Furthermore, we will use qualitative approach in order to capture and explain individual practices and institutions which political and economic officials create. Particularly, we will conduct the in-depth interviews with middle-range politicians on the executive positions in the highest state institutions. The analysis will be based on interviews held from April to June 2013 and it will present two integrated levels of interactions between politics and the economy. Firstly, we will analyze the relations between the public institutions and the private capital. Especially, we will show how politicians use their positions in the public institutions to gain particular interest for their political parties. Secondly, we will investigate the process of monopolization of the positions in the public sector by the political parties which currently hold public resources. On the first level, it is shown that political parties are significantly financially dependent on the economic capital. These interactions are informal in a way that politicians gain financial support in order to provide privileged positions for their partners. On the other level, we consider the reality that political parties became the important channel for social mobility. Thus, it is crucial to understand the dynamics and functional conditionings and limitations between different structures in the political party. Taking into consideration that political parties depend greatly on loyalty of their members, it gives the possibility for middle and lower echelons to make a pressure on party leadership to infiltrate party members in the public institutions.