Introduction
With the momentum of democracy’s Third Wave now passed,
a number of scholars (among
others, Geddes 1999 a & b, Gandhi and Przeworski 2001) have noted the dearth of careful
contemporary comparative politics scholarship on authoritarianism itself – a lacuna that has
hampered our ability to understand and predict democratization. In Diamond’s words, “if we are
to understand the contemporary dynamics, causes, limits, and possibilities of regime change
(including possible future democratization), we must understand the different, and in some
respects new, types of authoritarian rule” (2002, 33).
This paper focuses on single-party variants of authoritarian rule, which have proven to be
especially resilient forms. This empirical fact has been brought home most powerfully by
Geddes, who developed a dataset of every military, personalist, and single-party regime since
1945 (1999b). She found that while the average lifespans of military and personalist regimes
were 9 and 15 years respectively, that of single-party regimes was 23 years (this figure is much
higher if single-party regimes maintained by outside powers – think the Soviet bloc – are
included in the calculation). Similarly, while only 11.1% of military regimes still survived in
1999, and 17.3% of personal regimes did so, 36.4% of single-party regimes in the data set still
were in existence in 1999.
Despite single-party regimes’ special ability to endure, on occasion, they do fall. The following
is a preliminary attempt to advance our understanding of the conditions under which such
regimes break down in a democratizing direction (for, as the following will show, as many
single-party regimes have been replaced by other forms of dictatorship as by democratic
systems).
Geddes has argued that relative to personalist and military regimes, single-party regimes are
dramatically more stable and long-lived because members of ruling parties have particularly
strong incentives not to defect from the dominant coalition and establish an opposition presence
(1999b). Langston (2004) hypothesizes that the holding of elections (particularly legislative, and
in the context of rising levels of electoral competition) can encourage dissident ruling party elites
1
Diamond (2002, 23) asserts that the Third Wave “essentially crested in the mid-1990s.”
2
Convention