As the preceding analysis has shown, the structure of the consociational frameworks in Lebanon and Iraq perpetuates sectarian identities, facilitates elite capture of the state, and reduces state performance. It also cuts ties between citizens and the state by allowing recognised sectarian groups to serve as intermediaries in many areas of life. From this perspective, both countries are night-watcher states in a novel sense of the term – their governments are not small in size, in fact they are rather bloated, but their functional output is minimal.

Below, we examine the tools used by politicians to maintain exclusive ties between sectarian parties and citizens and to cement their grip on the sectarian consociational governance structures of their countries. The basic mechanism is that political parties appropriate a share of public authority and public resources and redistribute them to maintain sectarian groups through clientelism – without forgetting themselves in the process. Naturally, this model features few incentives for elites to engage in reform, including in the face of sustained protests. Two such tools are public sector jobs in exchange for loyalty and parallel service structures.

Patronage politics: a bloated public sector

In material terms, the consociational governance systems of Lebanon and Iraq centre on the control of state resources by ethno-sectarian parties and elites, represented in an inclusive government. It includes fierce competition between parties and elites for power and influence through patronage networks. Specifically, public sector employment has become the primary means for building such networks because of its dominance in the economy. Patronage politics have also led to a dramatic expansion in the number of public sector employees. In Iraq, public sector employment has grown more than three-fold since 2003, with a nine-fold increase in spending on employee compensation, totalling an estimated US$50 billion in 2020. Predictably, this has led to burgeoning state budgets that are almost entirely dependent on fluctuating oil revenues.[31]

Although national statistics are notoriously unreliable in Lebanon, the increase in the size of the country’s public sector has also been alarming: from 75,000 employees (1974) to 175,000 in 2000, to approximately 300,000 in 2017. Moreover, and given the new ministerial prerogatives as a result of the Taif political reforms, it is estimated that approximately 50 per cent of new appointments in Lebanon were made on the basis of sectarian rather than meritocratic considerations, i.e. outside the purview of the Civil Service Board.[32]

The extension of the confessional parity principle beyond senior government positions mentioned earlier has a significant negative impact on the performance of state institutions. One immediate consequence is a reduction in the competence of personnel in the public sector. Another is an increase in personnel costs. Appointments are often made to benefit individual parties and involve nepotism and bribery, mostly for electioneering purposes in exchange for votes. For example, the majority of public schools in Lebanon have an average of three or fewer students per teacher compared with nearly 12 per teacher in private schools. Each public school student costs US$4,000 a year, a highly inflated figure considering the quality of education offered in many of these schools. In Iraq, the buying and selling of senior military ranks was a common practice, with bribes being paid in exchange for lucrative appointments. During a parliamentary session in November 2014, PM Haidar Al-Abadi claimed that some 50,000 ‘ghost soldiers’ were on the Ministry of Defence payroll. Unsurprisingly, such practices undermined the competence of the Iraqi military during the fight against IS.[33] The total number of ghost employees in the country is estimated at 500,000 – 20 per cent of the government payroll – at a cost of 5.5 trillion Iraqi Dinars (US$4.6 million) each month.[34]

Control over recruitment in the public sector also provides the political elite with substantial leverage over lucrative government contracts and tenders. Illicit party financing has historically been extracted by profiting from the award of major ministerial contracts. For example, the Druze leader Walid Joumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party has been granted a number of infrastructure projects through controlling the General Directorate of Urban Planning, which operates under the purview of the Ministry of Public Works and Transportation.

Most importantly, privatisation of the state via the public sector payroll shields political elites and their cronies from accountability and legal procedures, since sectarian leaders also appoint key judges and investigating magistrates. For example, even though Iraq has an Integrity Commission whose independence is assured by the constitution, it has thus far failed to prosecute high-level politicians or officials with ties to one of the larger political parties for corruption.[35] In situations where rule consists of a mix of elite collusion and competition based on sectarian power-sharing mechanisms, it is easy – and likely correct – to dismiss any charges against politicians and their associates as politically motivated.[36] The result is that justice is rarely done. In Iraq, corruption has also influenced authorities’ willingness to respect court orders: Interior Ministry and Justice Ministry employees often extorted bribes from detainees to release them even if the courts had already accorded them the right to be released.[37]

Over time, many public institutions operate as sectarian or party bastions. The Amal Movement is labelled ‘Lebanon’s deep state’, given its extensive clientelist network throughout the public sector. For example, the Ministry of Information is considered a party stronghold, as is the Council of the South, serving as Amal’s main patronage vehicle. In Iraq, the Ministry of Interior has long been the purview of the Badr Organization which, in consequence, controls a number of the country’s security organisations such as the federal police. Therefore, while the face of the minister may change, sizeable parts of the federal police retain loyalty to Badr. As such, sectarian appointments become a strategy to balance the influence of other factions, producing dangerous intra-state competition. Iraq’s Sunni-controlled Ministry of Defence is often used to balance the Shi’a-controlled Ministry of Interior. The Lebanese Future Movement closely vets recruits to the Internal Security Forces’ Intelligence Branch (fur‘al-ma‘lomat) in a bid to create a security arm that can serve as a counterbalance to the influence of the Amal Movement and Hezbollah in the Directorate of General Security and Military Intelligence.

The result is a public sector riddled with sectarianism, patronage, corruption, cronyism, and other types of distortion. The high public sector payroll limits the fiscal space available for investment.[38] Undersupplied public goods include infrastructure, education and capital stock – essential to sustainable economic growth. The size of the public sector payroll, the state’s weakness in enforcing the rule of law, its sizeable bureaucracy, and its central economic role also inhibit the formal private sector’s growth and its ability to generate decent jobs. In turn, this ensures that the general population remains dependent on employment in the public sector through wasta (i.e. connections and social/sectarian favours).

Parallel service channels

The bloated size of the public sector, along with levels of corruption and inefficiencies, means that a large proportion of tax revenue does not translate into public services. This gap is filled by sectarian political elites that perform state-like functions in the place of, or alongside, weakened official institutions in sectors such as healthcare, education, water, and even electricity. Such channels are not necessarily national in scope, but typically limited to particular geographical areas or social groups. It is important to note that this is not entirely a form of clientelism since the goal of service delivery is not always to gain political loyalty. Rather, it is a tool for sectarian groups to gain power in a certain spatial denomination and to increase their revenue. Since these channels tend to be more efficient than the state, they also have the power to undermine it, either through direct competition or by keeping particular constituencies turned away from the state in terms of their attitude towards it, or sometimes even their political affiliation.

Most importantly, however, such forms of parallel service provision disincentivise reforms to public service delivery and enable political elites to deliver to their constituents what the state fails to provide. As a result, dependencies between parties and constituents deepen and electoral loyalty is preserved. Electricity is a prime example in which sectarian loyalties manifest themselves. Lebanon’s electricity cuts extended to more than 20 hours a day in the summer of 2020, forcing households to rely on private neighbourhood providers. These largely unregulated neighbourhood suppliers are called the ‘generator mafia’ for their supposed political clout and the protection they enjoy from political and armed groups.[39] In Iraq, the capture of public electricity infrastructure in post-invasion Baghdad under the Sadrist movement meant that Sadrist-affiliated neighbourhoods saw an average increase in access to electricity that was significantly greater than in other areas of the city.[40]

In Lebanon, parallel structures started to develop during the civil war – i.e. when there was a complete breakdown of state government. In the post-war period, when militias transformed into political actors, parallel service provision channels enabled the consolidation and expansion of their position. Although the Taif accord ended the violence, it also institutionalised the war’s militia economy. Hezbollah’s growing socioeconomic footprint in southern Lebanon, a Shi’a majority region long neglected economically by the Lebanese state, is a good example. State negligence provided the party with the opportunity to provide services – such as education, healthcare, infrastructure and construction, micro-credit, sports and youth clubs, and religious institutions – gaining credit and followers in the process.[41] Similarly, Rafik Hariri – a Sunni businessman – metamorphosed into Lebanon’s main Sunni politician after 1990 when he realised that his economic clout and good relations with foreign patrons were not sufficient to fulfil his ambitions. He founded a philanthropic arm called the Hariri Foundation that, in just a few years, became the country’s largest provider of healthcare, education and social services, but mostly for the Lebanese Sunni population.[42]

In Iraq, services are also provided by charitable organisations tied closely to certain political groups. After the fall of the Hussein regime, Shi’ite religious centres resurfaced with their basic structures relatively intact. This was chiefly visible in governorates south of Baghdad, where groups gather around religious figures (including Ayatollahs Al-Hakim, Al-Kho’ei, and Al-Sadr). For example, the Al-Hakim Foundation, headed by Ammar Al-Hakim and created in 2004 in Najaf, established more than 500 educational, cultural and humanitarian centres throughout Iraq in less than a decade. Following the 2003 US-led invasion, Sadr issued a directive to his fledgling movement to assist victims of the conflict. What had been a small social outreach organisation based in Sadr's home in the Shi’ite holy city of Najaf was expanded to meet the massive humanitarian needs of Shi’ites in Baghdad. Today, Sadr is considered one of the main providers of emergency assistance in Iraq – gifting money to the families of the dead and injured, resettling displaced families free of charge, and helping to feed tens of thousands of Sadr City’s most impoverished people every month.[43]

Armed groups have also increased their role as service providers in Iraq in localities where the state has a poor reach, evoking comparisons with groups in Lebanon. For example, the Hashd Al-Sha’abi, an umbrella organisation composed of mostly Iran-linked Shi’a groups, engaged extensively in reconstruction and humanitarian relief after the declaration of victory over IS in 2017.[44] In doing so, these groups acquired utilitarian legitimacy.

In a 2019 Chatham House survey, respondents across Iraq argued that providing services was the third most important quality for a legitimate leader.[45] In times of crisis, such parallel service channels become even more important. The Hashd al-Sha’abi has led much of the relief effort to combat the spread of Covid-19 in Iraq through public awareness-raising workshops in universities and schools, disinfecting streets and holding public buildings, and guarding cities and neighbourhoods. In addition to making their field hospitals accessible to the public, the Popular Mobilisation Forces have joined forces with the Shrine authorities in Karbala to build civil hospitals providing intensive care.[46] In Lebanon, Hezbollah recently announced the implementation of a fully-fledged health emergency plan. While Covid-19 tests remain expensive, the party ensures that its hospitals administer free testing and treatment.[47] As such, the Covid-19 crisis has provided political elites and sub-state actors in both Iraq and Lebanon with an opportunity to reassert their roles in relation to the very citizens who, only weeks ago, were protesting against them – and in some cases still are. But the gravity of the crisis has re-imposed relations of dependency.[48]

Interim conclusion

Clientelist relationships and informal service delivery channels are mechanisms that ensure the dependence of citizens on sectarian parties. In consequence, since sectarian favouritism takes precedence over universal provision based on citizenship and output efficiency, these mechanisms undermine the state as provider of public goods. Since the corrupt parties that run these mechanisms also run the state, using it as resource to keep going – and recycling themselves in the process – they make the state resistant to reform. Hence, sectarian mechanisms, as well as weakening the state’s ability to deliver, also make the state resistant to change. Once the logic of power sharing on a sectarian basis has asserted itself in combination with social autonomy for a particular sectarian constituency, incentives for change wither. The setup produces significant benefits for those with the power to change it. From an individual point of view, it is often more beneficial to be part of the system than to be excluded from it, which helps explain the durability of some sectarian constituencies despite massive public performance failures.