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ABSTRACT
A number of studies show that autocracies with ruling parties are more long-lived than those without. Much of the literature attributes this to party institutionalization at the elite- level, which is said to reduce elite schisms. Others point to the ability of grassroots party organizations to mobilize mass support. There is very little empirical research that examines these different mechanisms. This paper fills that gap using new data from the V-Party database, which provides detailed expert-coded information on the attributes of all autocratic ruling par- ties between 1970 and 2019. I find that both mass-based organization (e.g. well-developed networks of local branches and strong ties to social organizations) and elite-level institutionalization (e.g. depersonalized, collective control over candidate nominations) are associated with regime longevity, but the findings for mass organization are stronger and more robust. The findings suggest that mass organization is one of the main factors that makes party-based autocracy so durable.
Acknowledgement
Support from the Basic Research Program of the National Research University Higher School of Economics is gratefully acknowledged.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Geddes, “What Do We Know”; Svolik, Politics of Authoritarian Rule; Wright and Escriba-Folch, “Authoritarian Institutions”; Levitsky and Way, “Competitive Authoritarianism”; Kavasoglu, “Authoritarian Ruling Parties.”
2 For example, see, Slater, Ordering Power; Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism; Handlin, “Mass Organization.”
3 Lührmann et al., V-Party Dataset.
4 Geddes, “What Do We Know”; Magaloni, “Credible Power-Sharing”; Svolik, Politics of Authoritarian Rule; Wright and Escriba-Folch, “Authoritarian Institutions”; Levitsky and Way, “Competitive Authoritarianism”; Kavasoglu, “Authoritarian Ruling Parties.”
5 Slater, Ordering Power; Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism.
6 Brownlee, Authoritarianism in Age of Democracy; Reuter, Origins of Dominant Parties.
7 Svolik, Politics of Authoritarian Rule; Reuter and Turovsky, “Dominant Party Rule.”
8 Svolik, Politics of Authoritarian Rule; Meng, Constraining Dictatorship.
9 See Magaloni, “Credible Power-Sharing”; Reuter, Origins of Dominant Parties; Meng, “Ruling Parties in Authoritarian Regimes.”
10 There are some partial exceptions, including Meng who demonstrates that parties that outlive their founding leader – and have thus demonstrated some institutional autonomy – are more stable than those that do not. See Meng, “Ruling Parties in Authoritarian Regimes.” Reuter and Szakonyi show that United Russia, Russia's ruling party, has experienced more defections in regions with more personalist leadership. See Reuter and Szakonyi, “Elite Defection under Autocracy.”
11 Linz, An Authoritarian Regime, 260.
12 Indeed, given the importance of communist regimes in the mid-twentieth century, it made sense that mass mobilization received significant attention in the literature. By contrast twenty-first century literature on autocracy was heavily influenced by neo-institutional currents that were dominant in comparative politics in the 1990s. These institutional approaches, especially those influenced by rational choice theory, were better suited to studying elite-level institutions.
13 Apter, Politics of Modernization; Huntington, Political Order; Zolberg, One-Party Government.
14 Slater, Ordering Power; Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism; Handlin, “Mass Organization.”
15 For example, Handlin, “Mass Organization.”
16 Friedgut, Political Participation in USSR; Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism; Geddes, Wright, and Frantz, How Dictatorships Work, 133.
17 Stokes, “Perverse Accountability.”
18 Lipset, Political Man; Huntington, Political Order.
19 Howard and Roessler, “Post-Cold War Political Regimes.”
20 Results are substantively similar using alternative, dichotomous measures of regime type such as Geddes, Wright, and Frantz and Boix, Miller, and Rosato. See Geddes, Wright and Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown”; Boix, Miller, and Rosato, “Dichotomous Coding of Democracy.” See Appendix Tables A6 and A7.
21 1972 is the first year that Freedom House began its coding.
22 Geddes, Wright, and Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown,” 314.
23 Geddes, Wright, and Frantz, “Autocratic Breakdown.”
24 Lührmann et al., V-Party Dataset.
25 Coppedge,et al., “Methodology of ‘Varieties of Democracy’.”
26 Pemstein, “V-Dem Measurement Model.”
27 See Miller, “Autocratic Ruling Parties Dataset.” The two ruling party lists agreed in almost 99% of country-years. The substantive differences are the following: I include the National Resistance Movement in Uganda, which is excluded from the Miller data. For many years, it was not a formal political party, but still served the functions of a ruling party. Miller also excludes several ruling parties that have an arms-length relationship with the regime, such as government parties in Iran and Bhutan, and Istiqlal in Morocco. Results are robust to the exclusion of these parties. There are also three party spells that appear in my dataset but are missing from Miller's dataset for unknown reasons: the Tet Kele Party in Haiti in 2015, the MNSD-N in Niger in 2009, and the SLFP in Sri Lanka between 2010 and 2015.
28 Michels, Political Parties; Panebianco, Political Parties; Tavits, “Organizing for Success.”
29 Friedgut, Political Participation in USSR; Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism; Stokes, “Perverse Accountability.”
30 Przeworski and Sprague, Electoral Stones.
31 Kalyvas, “Christian Democracy in Europe.”
32 Levitsky, Transforming Labor-Based Parties; Samuels and Zucco, “Crafting Mass Partisanship.”
33 Handlin, “Mass Organization.”
34 Kasza, The Conscription Society.
35 For a more rigorous validation of these new measures, including a discussion of this index, see Düpont et al., “Global Perspective on Party Organizations.”
36 In initial analyses, I use the ordinal version of this variable shown in , but I also explore a dichotomous version that differentiates leader-controlled nomination procedures from all collective nomination procedures.
37 For example, Geddes, Wright, and Frantz, How Dictatorships Work; Meng, “Ruling Parties in Authoritarian Regimes”; Zeng, “All Power.”
38 Data on the age of the party comes from Miller. See Miller, “Autocratic Ruling Parties Dataset.”
39 Pemstein, “V-Dem Measurement Model.”
40 Beck, Katz, and Tucker, “Taking Time Seriously.”
41 This coding rule implies that we are unable to analyse regimes that do not hold any elections at all. Fortunately, this is quite rare, as the vast majority of regimes with ruling parties also have some form of election, whether single-party or multiparty.
42 In the Empirical Extensions and Robustness Checks section, I also explore specifications that extend the analysis to include non-party regimes, assigning minimal values of party organization and institutionalization.
43 Carter and Signorino, “Back to the Future.”
44 Since many countries experience only one or few regimes, the main models do not include country fixed effects. But as I show in the appendix, results are robust to the inclusion of country fixed effects.
45 I treat Party Predates Regime as a measure of elite institutionalization, but since it is also modestly correlated with mass organization – and may even ben conceptually related to it – I prefer to treat Party Personalization and Collective Nomination Procedures as the cleanest measures of elite institutionalization.
46 Slater, “Iron Cage, Iron Fist.”
47 For this, Collective Nomination Procedures is reverse coded so that higher values indicate more influence by the leader.
48 Similar results are obtained when the individual components of Mass Org. Index are placed in the model alongside Collective Nomination Procedures.
49 Zeng, “All Power”; LaChapelle et al., “Social Revolution.”
50 LaChapelle et al., “Social Revolution.”
51 Zeng, “All Power”; LaChapelle et al., “Social Revolution.”
52 Cox, Making Votes Count; Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy.
53 Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy; Greene, Why Dominant Parties Lose.
54 The prompt includes the following clarification for coders: “Party strategies include election campaign strategy, policy stance, distribution of party financial resources, cooperation with other parties (i.e. coalition formation), and the selection of legislative and presidential candidates as well as the party leader.”
55 Elite Schisms shows a trend toward significance with a p-value of 0.109.
56 For V-Party's continuous measurement model values, the value is set at the minimum value for that variable in the authoritarian ruling party subset. So a non-party regime is coded the same as the “weakest” party for that indicator.
57 Treisman and Guriev, “The Popularity of Authoritarian Leaders.”
58 Truex, “Consultative Authoritarianism.”
59 LaChapelle et al., “Social Revolution”; Handlin, “Mass Organization.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ora John Reuter
Ora John Reuter is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and Senior Researcher at the Higher School of Economics-Moscow. His work focuses on authoritarian regimes, institutions, and voting behavior, with a particular emphasis on contemporary Russian politics.