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

CHAPTER 6
Table 6.3: Restrictions on political parties and the survival of authoritarian ruling coalitions,
1946-2008
Restrictions on At the beginning At the end
Party Organization of a Ruling Coalition of a Ruling Coalition
Median Mean N Median Mean N
Parties banned 9 16.56 81 3 13.85 57
(3,15) (12.33,20.78) (2,8) (8.63,19.08)
Single party 27 29.87 51 22 25.08 49
(20,35) (24.51,34.24) (15,30) (20.00,30.17)
Multiple parties 8 15.91 195 10 17.90 223
(7,10) (13.10,18.53) (8,13) (15.26,20.54)
Note: The unit of observation is an authoritarian ruling coalition. 95% confidence intervals in
parentheses. Largest ruling coalition durations are right-censored; means are therefore
underestimated.
Dopartiescontribute tothesurvival ofauthoritarianrulingcoalitions? Table6.3presents
the estimated mean and median survival times of ruling coalitions by the type of restriction
on political parties. I list the 95% confidence interval below each estimated quantity in Table
6.3. 29 Because restrictions on political parties may vary throughout the duration of a ruling
coalition, I present estimates based on the type of restrictions on political parties in place
both at the beginning and at the end of a ruling coalition’s existence. 30
Table 6.3 indicates that ruling coalitions with single parties indeed survive between two
and three times longer than either those without parties or those ruling coalitions that allow
for the existence of multiple parties. We see that this difference is statistically significant as
there is almost no overlap between the 95% confidence intervals for the mean or the median
29 These confidence intervals are calculated using the Kaplan-Meier estimator, accounting for the presence
of right-censored data in the sample; see Klein and Moeschberger (2003, chapter 4).
30 We may directly account for the variation in restrictions on political parties by including this information
as a covariate in a survival model. Estimates based on both the Cox proportional hazard model and
parametric accelerated failure-time models lead to conclusions that identical to those discussed here.
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