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

CHAPTER 6
defect to the challenger. I am using the term ideology in a very broad sense, incorporating
any nonmaterial factors that may affect a citizen’s preference for the incumbent dictator
vis-à-vis the challenger, including religious, ethnic, or charismatic attributes of the dictator
and the challenger.
Suppose that the population’s ideology g is distributed on the real line according to
the probability distribution function F(g) = Pr(gi < g) and gi ∈ R is citizen i’s ideology.
To keep the exposition simple, I will assume that ideological concerns enter each citizen’s
preferences additively, intheformofaquadraticlossfunction−(gi−gj) 2 , wheregj ∈ {gI,gC}
is the incumbent’s and challenger’s ideological position, respectively. Thus when deciding
between supporting the incumbent dictator and defecting to the challenger, each citizen is
comparing her material and ideological payoffs under the two regimes, uI = ˆ bI −(gi −gI) 2
and uC = ˆ bC − (gi − gC) 2 , where ˆ bI and ˆ bC denote the expected per-period payoff under
he incumbent dictator and the challenger, respectively. When the incumbent coopts via a
regime-sanctioned party, ˆ bI will correspond to the average per-period payoffs (1 − δ)u J i or
(1−δ)u S i
, depending on citizen i’s party rank.
In addition to coopting, the incumbent can also repress. In any period, the cost of
repressing a single citizen is r. I adopt a very rudimentary notion of repression: repressing a
citizen prevents her from defecting to the challenger and the cost of repression are constant
in a citizen’s ideology. 22
Whom should the incumbent dictator coopt and whom repress? Without a loss of gener-
22 The latter reflects the idea that, once an individual decides to defect to the challenger, the cost of
imprisoning her does not vary with that individual’s ideology. A more realistic model of an opposition
resistance might assume that the cost of repression is increasing in a citizen’s ideological distance from the
incumbent. The argument below follows as long the marginal cost of repression is increasing in a citizen’s
ideological distance from the incumbent at a lower rate that the marginal cost of cooptation.
34