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

CHAPTER 6
the city-state’s economy through “government-linked companies”, as they are known, whose
corporate boards fuse government, party, and business elites (Mauzy and Milne 2002, 28-35).
Nonetheless, inmost dictatorships withdominant andhegemonic parties, thegovernment
and the party may frequently be “perceived as a single structure in terms of the pursuit off
regime goals” as Grindle (1977, 47) observed about Mexico under the PRI. After Suharto’s
government in Indonesia decided to hold its first post-coup election in 1971, it put in force a
policy of “monoloyalty” according to which a “civil servant was obliged to serve unstintingly
the government that employed him, and to renounce other competing ties”(Ward 1974, 33).
In practice, all civil servants were required to sever their ties with any other party and
encouraged to join the government-sanctioned Golkar (Elson 2001, 186-191).
Because dictatorships with dominant and hegemonic parties have multi-party elections,
political control over the public sector serves the dual role of providing incentives for party
service as well as ensuring electoral hegemony. Magaloni (2006, 8) shows how in the case
of Mexico “a public image of invincibility” discouraged both defections from within the
ruling party and helped maintain dominance at the polls. The present model highlights
the importance of a large and politically administered public sector, which in combination
with the expectation of a continued control of the government strengthens the incentives for
service within the governing party. As an Egyptian member of parliament for the ruling
National Democratic Party explains,
”The NDP is good. But I am not talking about ideology or anything like that.
This is not important. I do not think any of us [NDP deputies] care about that.
What I mean is that it provides access to the services needed by the people. This
is because it is the President’s Party. I or anybody else in the NDP would join
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