Runaway State-Building: Patronage Politics and Democratic Development. By Conor O'Dwyer. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. 278p. $49.95.

This first book by Conor O'Dwyer adds to a growing and impressive collection of works on state building in postcommunist countries. In it he seeks to explain the variation in the growth of large patronage networks in state administrations in three central European countries—Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. In doing so, he looks to the relationship between the establishment of strong party systems and the ability of states to withstand the emergence of extensive patronage networks. Specifically, he posits (p. 13) that “the magnitude and character of administrative expansion is determined by the capacity of party competition to constrain patronage.” He concludes that taking all considerations into account, it is the presence or absence of a strongly competitive party system that most clearly explains the sleek state administrative structures in the Czech Republic and the bloated bureaucracy in Poland and Slovakia. The failure of these two countries, whose leaders had so keenly sought to dismantle the communist nomenklatura system, to gain control of what O'Dwyer calls “runaway state-building” is richly detailed and persuasively argued in this excellent book.