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

Mean Ruling Coalition Age
in Years
5 10 15 20 25 30
CHAPTER 6
0−9 10−19 20−29 30−39 40−49 50−59 60−69 70−79 80−89 90−99
Mean Legislative Seat Share
Mean Ruling Coalition Age Linear Fit
Figure 6.3: The association between legislative seat share and the age of authoritarian ruling
coalitions, 1946-2008.
Inordertoillustratethisassociation, Iplotthemeanageofauthoritarianrulingcoalitions
against the mean share of legislative seats that the coalition’s regime party controlled in
Figure 6.3. To simplify the presentation, the latter quantity is grouped into ten equally
spaced intervals. We see that dictatorships with regime parties that control a supermajority
of legislative seats survive on average almost as long as those with single parties.
To summarize, the findings of this empirical analysis are consistent with the implications
of my theoretical analysis in Section 6.1. We see that the empirical association between
dictatorships withsinglepartiesandthesurvival oftheregimesthatmaintainthemisrobust.
50