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

CHAPTER 6
transitioned to dictatorship or a dictatorship is about to democratize. Alberto Fujimori is an
example of the former: Before he subverted democracy in Peru, he established Cambio 90, a
party whose primary purpose was to promote his presidential candidacy in 1990. Although
it strengthened its standing in the legislature in 1992 and 1995, Cambio 90 initially won only
17% of the seats (see e.g. Klaren 1999). Empirically, these temporary transitional scenarios
are rare and account for only 8% of all observations.
Doesthelegislative strength ofregime parties indictatorships that allow formultiple par-
tiesparallelthecontributionofsinglepartiestothesurvivalofauthoritarianrulingcoalitions?
In Table 6.6, I present an estimate of the association between a regime party’s legislative
seat share and the survival of authoritarian ruling coalitions based the Cox survival model.
The estimated coefficients are presented in the form of a hazard ratio: a coefficient smaller
than 1 implies that the associated covariate reduces the relative risk that an authoritarian
ruling coalition loses power.
Model1preserves thelargestnumber ofobservations, models2and3controlforeconomic
andinstitutional covariatestypically employed intheresearch onauthoritariansurvival. The
covariate data on GDP per capita and GDP growth are from Maddison (2008), the data on
fuel and ore exports are from World Bank (2008), and the data on democratic neighbors was
constructed by combining the contiguity data from the Correlates of War Project (2006) and
the regime data described in Chapter 2.
We see that there is a strong association between legislative seat share and the survival
of authoritarian ruling coalitions: Each percentage point increase in the regime party’s
seat share lowers the risk of a ruling coalition’s demise by about 2%. For instance, an
increase a regime party’s legislative seat share from 55% to 75% corresponds to a 30%
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