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

u NS
i
CHAPTER 6
= b/(1−δ) is her payoff after a promotion. The modified party service constraint (6.7)
asks that u J i ≥ u NJ
i . Intuitively, incentives for party membership and the provision of the
associated costly service are stronger when the likelihood q of obtaining benefits equivalent
to party seniority outside the party is minimal.
The present explanation also suggests that – even thought dictatorships with single par-
ties may maintain deeper and more extensive political control over their societies than dicta-
torships with dominant parties – the underlying political logic is identical. Thus one extreme
may be exemplified by the Soviet nomenklatura system whose essence, according to Rigby
(1988, 523), was to “consciously manage every area of socially relevant activity, outside a
closely circumscribed private sphere, through an array of hierarchically structured formal
organizations, all coordinated and directed at the center and at successively lower levels by
the apparatus of the Communist Party.” When Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms com-
promised the Chinese Communist Party’s ability to maintain such control in the emerging
private sector, Jiang Zemin recommended that private entrepreneurs be allowed to join the
CCP and encouraged the formation of grassroots party organizations within private corpo-
rations (Dickson 2003).
On the other hand, party control over key economic and social appointments in dictator-
ships with dominant and hegemonic parties is typically less formalized and pervasive than
in dictatorships with single parties. These regimes primarily rely on a bloated public sec-
tor for the distribution of politically administered patronage (Blaydes 2010; Magaloni 2006;
Van de Walle 2001) as well as the regulation and co-ownership of the private sector. In
Singapore, to take one example, the sole legal trade union since 1968 is the pro-government
National Trade Union Congress andthe government maintains political influence throughout
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