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

CHAPTER 6
ski 1965, 130-132). Thus according to Arendt (1951), the aim of totalitarianism is “the
permanent domination of each single individual in each and every sphere of life” (Arendt
1951, 326). Yet even by the admission of its theorists, this totalitarian ideal was rarely
approximated outside a few emblematic cases, especially those of Adolf Hitler’s Germany
and Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The present framework suggests a very different interpretation of the dense nexus of
the party, government, and key economic and social positions that we observe across single
and dominant party dictatorships. Rather than an end in itself – as classic theorists of
totalitarianism may view it – single and dominant party regimes aim at political control of
their economies and societies because such control is key to effective party-based cooptation.
Individual incentives to provide the costly party service that the regime values are inversely
related to the ease with which significant career advances can occur outside the framework of
the party. Only if sufficiently many desirable careers depend on partisan credentials will the
party be able to coopt a politically consequential fraction of the society while accomplishing
the direct objective of political control.
In order to examine this intuition, we may extend our model of party-based cooptation
by assuming that, in any period, a citizen who is not a party member is promoted to a
position that pays a wage that equals the benefit to party seniority b with probability q.
Thus the expected discounted payoff to a career outside the party is now
u NJ
i
= w +δ[quNS
i +(1−q)uNJ
i ], (6.7)
where u NJ
i istheexpected discounted payoff to apartynon-member ibeforeapromotionand
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