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

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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). 26
CHAPTER 6 service and benefits within authoritarian parties. The assumption of only two party ranks is probably the starkest departure from real-world partisan hierarchies. This is a simplification whose sole purpose is to facilitate our examination of the incentives that emerge within party hierarchies by keeping our analysis tractable. This assumption can be easily relaxed: we can view the present setting as a partial model of career incentives across any two levels of a multi-level party hierarchy. For instance, our partial analysis implies that, in order to provide sufficient incentives for party membership and costly service by the junior ranks, the chances of promotion only have to be positive, not necessarily certain. When applied to any two levels of the party hierarchy, this result explains the pyramid-shaped structure of party apparatusesthat we typically observe inauthoritarianparties. 19 Similarly, we saw that after a junior party member provides costly service, she acquires an interest in the regime’s perpetuation. When applied across any two levels of the party hierarchy, this insight implies that a stake in the regime’s survival compounds with a member’s rank in the party hierarchy. 6.1.2 Political Control over Appointments Many single-party dictatorships appear to have aspired after total political and social control of their societies. As articulated by Benito Mussolini’s (1935, 30) “everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State” (Mussolini 1935, 30), the presumed political ambition of these regimes was a complete fusion of the state, the party, and the society. Classic works on totalitarianism have attributed this tendency to the social atomiza- tion of modern mass societies (Arendt 1951, 308-17) and the emergence of all-encompassing ideologies whose ultimate goal was to transform the human nature (Friedrich and Brzezin- 19 See e.g. Brownlee (2007, Chapter 2), Hinnebusch (2002, Chapter 4), Landry (2008), and Staar (1988). 27
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Page 55 and 56: Bibliography Abrami, Regina, Edmund
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Page 63: World Bank. 2008. World Development

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