This paper revisits the widely known and used concept of soft budget constraints in party-states introduced by Kornai (1980), from the point of view of a comparative analytical model (Csanádi, 2003). It embeds budget constraints in the structure of power relations described by the model as the...

Through the introduction of a comparative party-state model, I will first demonstrate that due to specific structural and dynamic constraints, the capacity of party-states to learn is both limited and uneven. Differences in the room for manoeuvre are defined by structural and dynamic specifics...