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

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CHAPTER 6 criterion precludes the valid use of such data in the study of authoritarian durability since survival in power past a fixed time threshold is assumed by the definition of a dominant or hegemonic party. 33 By contrast, I infer the presence of these categories directly from the empirical distribution of their legislative seat share. 6.3 Why Authoritarian Regime Parties? In this chapter, I have examined the internal make-up of regime-sanctioned authoritarian partiesandidentified theorganizationalfeatures bywhich partiescontributetoauthoritarian resilience. While extant literature frequently concludes that single and dominant party dictatorships coopt opposition and maintain elite cohesion, the precise mechanisms by which the institution of the party accounts for these functions frequently remains elusive. Geddes (1999b, 135), for instance, influentially observed that single-party regimes survive longer than personalist and military dictatorships “because their institutional structures make it relativelyeasyforthemtoallowgreaterparticipationandpopularinfluenceonpolicywithout giving up their dominant role in the political system.” In this chapter, I attempt to advance this research by identifying the specific institutional structures and the underlying political mechanisms by which the institution of the single or dominant party accounts for Geddes’s observation. Three organizational features of authoritarian parties – hierarchical assignment of service and benefits, political control over appointments, and selective recruitment and repression 33 For instance, Magaloni (2006, 36-37) and Greene (2007, 12) ask that a dominant party controls the executive and the legislature for at least 20 years, and Geddes (1999b, 125) calls an authoritarian regime single-party if the “dominant party has never lost control of the executive since coming to power and usually wins more than two thirds of the seats in the legislature.” 52
CHAPTER 6 – take advantage of natural career aspirations in order to create an enduring stake in the regime’s survival among the most productive and ideologically agreeable segments of the population. This analysis highlights the need to analytically distinguish between cooptation via policies or transfers, and cooptation via the institution of the party. The advantages and operation of the latter are intimately linked to specific organizational features of authoritarian parties. The simple formal models of party-based cooptation in Section 6.1 help us examine the political mechanism by which those organizational features facilitate cooptation and suggest that, rather than “political exchange”, cooptation via authoritarian parties is better thought of as “sunk investment” on part of their members. Crucially, these models help us understand not only the potential of party-based cooptation but also its limits. We saw that cooptation via the institution of the party must be initiated by a signal of the regime’s strength, it requires the maintenance of a politically sensitive balance between recruitment, promotion, and retirement policies within the party, and contributes to the regime’s resilience to challengers from the outside but not from the inside. The theoretical analysis in this chapter has so far focused on the first of the three questions that I asked at the outset: How and which organizational features of authoritarian parties contribute to authoritarian resilience? An explicit focus on both the potential of but also the limits to party-based cooptation allows us to address the two remaining, affiliated questions. Why cannot dictators obtain the political benefits of party-based cooptation and control without the actual institution of the party? According to the arguments outlined above, the institution of the party provides the organizational skeleton through which the regime jointly manages hierarchical assignment of service and benefits, selective recruitment and 53
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Page 55 and 56: Bibliography Abrami, Regina, Edmund
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Page 63: World Bank. 2008. World Development

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