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ABSTRACT
Personalist dictatorships make up an increasingly large proportion of the world's dictatorships. Moreover, they tend to be particularly resistant to democratization. Understanding the conditions that increase the likelihood of democratic transitions in personalist contexts, therefore, is critical for the study and practice of democratization in the contemporary era. This study argues that political party creation is a key factor. Though personalist dictators typically create parties to offset immediate threats to their power posed by the elite – and particularly the military – doing so encourages peaceful mass mobilization and a realignment of elite networks. These dynamics, in turn, enhance prospects of democratization. Using cross-national empirical tests that address the potential endogeneity of this relationship, we find support for the argument that personalist dictators who create their own political party are more likely to democratize than those who ally with a pre-existing party or rule without one.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes on contributors
Erica Frantz is an assistant professor in Political Science at Michigan State University. She studies authoritarian politics, with a focus on democratization, conflict, and development. She has published four books, and articles in journals such as Perspectives on Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Journal of Peace Research, and Annual Review of Political Science.
Andrea Kendall-Taylor is Deputy National Intelligence Officer at the U.S. National Intelligence Council. She is also Adjunct Professor of Political Science at George Mason University and specializes in authoritarian politics, democratization, and political instability. She has published articles in the Washington Quarterly, the Journal of Peace Research, and Foreign Policy.
Notes
1. Geddes, Paradigms and Sand Castles.
2. See Ezrow and Frantz, Dictators and Dictatorships, for a review of this literature.
3. Data used for these statistics are discussed in the empirical section.
4. See Ezrow and Frantz, Dictators and Dictatorships, for a review of this literature.
5. Geddes, Wright, and Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown and Regime Transitions.” See Escribà-Folch, “Accountable for What?” for a discussion of the mechanism underlying this relationship.
6. Geddes, “Why Parties and Elections in Authoritarian Regimes?”; Geddes, “Party Creation as an Authoritarian Survival Strategy.”
7. Celestino and Gleditsch, “Fresh Carnations or All Thorn, No Rose?”
8. Wright and Escribà-Folch, “Authoritarian Institutions and Regime Survival.”
9. Wintrobe, The Political Economy of Dictatorship.
10. Lichbach, “Deterrence or Escalation?”; Moore, “Repression and Dissent.”
11. Wintrobe, The Political Economy of Dictatorship.
12. Frantz and Kendall-Taylor, “A Dictator's Toolkit.”
13. Magaloni, “Credible Power-Sharing and the Longevity of Authoritarian Rule.”
14. Ibid.
15. Boix and Svolik, “The Foundations of Limited Authoritarian Government.”
16. Blaydes, “Authoritarian Elections and Elite Management”; Gandhi and Przeworski, “Cooperation, Cooptation, and Rebellion under Dictatorships”; Geddes, “Why Parties and Elections in Authoritarian Regimes?”; Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy.
17. Wright and Escribà-Folch, “Authoritarian Institutions and Regime Survival.”
18. Geddes, “Why Parties and Elections in Authoritarian Regimes?”; Geddes, “Party Creation as an Authoritarian Survival Strategy.”
19. Svolik, “Power Sharing and Leadership Dynamics in Authoritarian Regimes.”
20. Powell, “Determinants of the Attempting and Outcome of Coups d’état.”
21. Research has shown that elections in autocracies also serve to reduce the incidence of coups. Cox, “Authoritarian Elections and Leadership Succession,” finds that elections in authoritarian settings help regularize politics by reducing the incidence of “irregular” regime change, including coups.
22. Geddes, “Why Parties and Elections in Authoritarian Regimes?”; Geddes, “Party Creation as an Authoritarian Survival Strategy.”
23. McAdam, Tarrow, and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention. Weak parties lack the capacity to check the leader's power, regulate leadership turnover, and weigh in on policy choices. Such parties facilitate mass mobilization, as all parties do. As an indicator of the weakness of parties in personalist dictatorships, using time-varying data from Geddes, Wright, and Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown” (discussed in the empirical section), we find that only two personalist dictatorships since World War II have ever – at any point while in power – had a political party whose top leadership posts were selected independently of the leader. These regimes are Georgia (1992–2003) and Guinea-Bissau (1980–1999). Even in these cases, the military functioned as a rival institution to the party, with the leader serving as a puppeteer overseeing both.
24. Party creation is not a guarantee for democratization in personalist dictatorships given that about half of these regimes create parties but only around a third of all personalist dictatorships transition to democracy. That being said, it does set in motion regime dynamics that create democracy enhancing opportunities. This typology is based on Geddes', Paradigms and Sand Castles, categorization of regimes as military, party, or personalist. See Ezrow and Frantz, Dictators and Dictatorships, for a discussion of other typologies of dictatorship.
25. Protest data come from the NAVCO (Non-Violent and Violent Campaigns and Outcomes) data set. Chenoweth and Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works. The data measuring dictatorships are explained in the empirical section.
26. Celestino and Gleditsch, “Fresh Carnations or All Thorn, No Rose?”; Chenoweth and Stephan, “Why Civil Resistance Works”; Chenoweth and Stephan, Why Civil Resistance Works.
27. Celestino and Gleditsch, “Fresh Carnations or All Thorn, No Rose?”
28. One could argue that a leader's creation of a political party to counterbalance the military could create an opportunity for a leader to further sideline the military by creating new parallel security units. However, we argue that a leader's resources available for co-optation and repression are finite (see Wintrobe, The Political Economy of Dictatorship). A leader who chooses to incur the costs associated with party creation – ranging from getting the organization up and running to reaching out and establishing viable networks of supporters – will be less likely to allocate the same level of resources on the security apparatus as a leader who did not have to incur these costs either because he inherited a party or does not have one.
29. Belkin and Schofer, “Toward a Structural Understanding of Coup Risk.”
30. Kobusingye, The Correct Line?
31. Bengio, “How does Saddam Hold On.”
32. Bellin, “Reconsidering the Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East.”
33. Mitchell, Carey, and Butler, “The Impact of Pro-Government Militias on Human Rights Violations”; Carey, Mitchell, and Lowe, “States, the Security Sector, and the Monopoly of Violence.”
34. Barany, The Soldier and the Changing State, 30.
35. Finn, “Experts Say Gaddafi Relying on Paramilitary Forces.”
36. Tucker, “Enough!”
37. We measure this using data from the Pro-Government Militias Database (PGMD), which identifies the presence of pro-government militias that are not part of the regular security forces. Carey, Mitchell, and Lowe, “States, the Security Sector, and the Monopoly of Violence.”
38. Cameron, “Political and Economic Origins of Regime Change in Peru,” 38.
39. Corrales, Presidents Without Parties.
40. Nodia and Scholtbach, The Political Landscape of Georgia, 18.
41. Ezrow and Frantz, Dictators and Dictatorships.
42. Geddes, Wright, and Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown.”
43. Ibid., 319. Hadenius and Teorell, “Pathways from Authoritarianism,” argue that personalism is not a regime category, but rather a continuous trait. Ideally, we would like to use a continuous measure of personalism, as well, to assess whether increasing levels alter the relationship between party creation and democratization in dictatorships. Though such a measure does not publicly exist yet, Geddes, Honaker, and Wright, Measuring What You Can't See, have proposed a method for doing so that could eventually be used in research on these themes.
44. The statistical model offered in Model 9 in the Appendix compares personalist dictatorships that created parties with those that allied with a pre-existing one. The coefficient of party creation is positive and statistically significant in this sub-sample, indicating that the large difference between the democratization rates of party creators and those leaders who rule without a support party is not driving the results.
45. Data for these measures come from the World Bank's World Development Indicators and the Polity IV Project. We group countries into the five regions represented in the sample: Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
46. Carter and Signorino, “Back to the Future.”
47. Data for this measure come the Correlates of War project.
48. Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism.
49. Goemans, Gleditsch, and Chiozza, “Introducing Archigos,”
50. Geddes, “Party Creation as an Authoritarian Survival Strategy.”
51. Data come from the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO).
52. King, Tomz, and Wittenberg, “Making the Most of Statistical Analysis.”
53. Pepinsky, “The Institutional Turn in Comparative Authoritarianism.”
54. Angrist and Krueger, “Instrumental Variables and the Search for Identification”; Angrist and Pischke, Mostly Harmless Econometrics; Sovey and Green, “Instrumental Variables Estimation in Political Science”; Gujarati, Basic Econometrics.
55. Angrist and Krueger, “Instrumental Variables Estimation in Political Science”; Wooldridge, Econometric Analysis of Cross Section and Panel Data.
56. Sovey and Green, “Instrumental Variables Estimation in Political Science.”
57. Geddes, “Party Creation as an Authoritarian Survival Strategy.”
58. We acknowledge that there may be country-specific unobserved factors that affect whether junior versus senior officers are able to seize power, which in turn affect democratization prospects. We account for this possibility by using fixed effects in Models 7 and 8 offered in the Appendix.
59. We thank a reviewer for this suggestion.
60. Bernhard et al., “Party Strength and Economic Growth.”
61. Sovey and Green, “Instrumental Variables Estimation in Political Science.”
62. Shea, “Instrument Relevance in Multivariate Linear Models”; Staiger and Stock, “Instrumental Variables Regression with Weak Instruments”; Sovey and Green, “Instrumental Variables Estimation in Political Science.”
63. See Freedom House: http://www.freedomhouse.org.
64. Davenport, “State Repression and the Tyrannical Peace.”
65. Geddes, Wright, and Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown.”
