Chapter 6 Why Authoritarian Parties? The Regime Party as an ...

CHAPTER 6
they may join a challenger who promises better prospects within the regime or opposition
that aims to overthrow the regime and establish democracy. Therefore the regime’s promise
to maintain an appropriate balance in its promotion and retirement policies is credible only
as far as the regime’s survival depends on the juniors’ party service. 18
The present analysis also highlights that, in order to launch the cooptation mechanism,
the regime needs to signal its strength, and hence durability, at the time of the party’s
founding. This initial, exogenous impetus is needed so that prospective party members
anticipate that the party will last long enough for their costly investment to come to fruition
in the form of party seniority. Hence the establishment of a single or dominant party regime
should witness more repression, and in the case of dominant party regimes, more restrictions
on competition than later periods. According with Huntington’s (1970) and Smith’s (2005)
observations that the strength of single and dominant parties depends on the intensity of
the struggle that brought them to power, this logic suggests that dictatorships that came
to power by revolutionary means may be in a better position to initiate a party-based
cooptationmechanism. Yet departing fromHuntington (1970)andSmith (2005), thepresent
analysis suggests that these initial demands on credibility abate once the overlapping, inter-
generational cooptation mechanism self-perpetuates and independently contributes to the
expectation of the regime’s continuing survival.
Finally, we havebeenworking withahighlysimplified modelofhierarchical assignment of
18 This intuition could easily be formalized: The interaction between junior and senior party members can
be seen as a two-periodsnapshotof an infinitely repeated overlappinggenerationsgame. Cooperationin such
a game can then be enforced by a grim trigger threat according to which junior party members withdraw
their service if the senior ranks do not retire at a promised rate. In the case of Mexico, for instance, the
prohibition on the re-election for all elected offices may be have been interpreted by the party’s rank-andfile
membership as a focal indicator of the elite’s commitment to upward mobility. On Folk Theorems for
repeated games with overlapping generations, see Smith (1992).
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