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

CHAPTER 6
exploits natural career aspirations within the general population in order to marginalize
actual, ideological opposition
To summarize my theoretical arguments so far, I have examined how three organizational
features of authoritarian parties – hierarchical assignment of service and benefits, political
control over appointments, and selective recruitment and repression – contribute to the sur-
vival of dictatorships. These features have been well known at the descriptive level, but the
precise mechanisms by which they may account for authoritarian resilience is frequently left
underspecified. A key empirical implication of this theoretical analysis is that authoritarian
regimes that coopt via a party with these organizational features – not necessarily a single
one – survive under less favorable circumstances and in the face of stronger challengers than
dictatorships without a party. I now empirically assess this prediction.
6.2 Regime Parties and Authoritarian Resilience
Does the establishment and maintenance of a regime-sanctioned political party contribute to
the survival of a dictatorship, as the above theoretical analysis suggests? Existing empirical
research takes two approaches to this question. The first was initiated by Geddes (1999a),
who classified dictatorships into personalist, military, single-party, and their hybrids and
studied the differences in the survival of these regime categories. 25 The second is exemplified
by Gandhi and Przeworski (2007), who study the association between the number of parties
under dictatorship and the survival of dictators. 26
25See also Brownlee (2007, Chapter 2), Geddes (2003, Chapter 2), Hadenius and Teorell (2007), Magaloni
(2008), and Smith (2005).
26See also Gandhi and Przeworski (2006) and Gandhi (2008).
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