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

CHAPTER 6
correlated with unemployment and negatively with real wages across the federal republics.
Since non-partisan opportunities for upward mobility may vary across the population, re-
cruitment and promotion policies must be targeted accordingly. Guo (2005) documents the
downward trend in interest in party membership among the college-educated in China dur-
ing the economic rise of the 1980s and the ensuing targeting of the college-educated by the
party in the 1990s via a screening process that favors those with a higher education.
The second way in which the regime can strengthen incentives for party service is to
extend the number of career appointments for which party membership is a consideration.
Moreprecisely, themodifiedpartyservice constraint (6.7)implies thattheregimecanaccom-
plish this by both requiring partisan credentials for a larger number of positions (a decrease
in q) and by focusing on lucrative careers (a decrease in w). The intuition behind the lat-
ter is illustrated by Grzyma̷la-Busse’s (2002, 31) observation about the differing incentives
for membership in the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia between white and blue-collar
employees:
“White-collarworkers hadconsiderable incentives tojointheparty–employment
in the stare sector was made exclusively the provenance or the party, as was
advancement within its ranks. The [party] had wanted to recruit blue-collar
workers but had fewer incentives for blue-collar workers to join, and far fewer
sanctions to keep them from leaving. For example, while white-collar workers
were demoted to menial jobs if they were expelled from the party, blue-collar
workers faced no such punishments.”
To summarize, widespread partisan control over political, administrative, and economic
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