Consequences of Authoritarian Party Exit and Reinvention for Democratic Competition

Abstract

How do the successors to authoritarian ruling parties influence subsequent democratic party competition? The existing literature does not distinguish among these parties, nor does it differentiate among the distinct strategies of their adaptation to the collapse of authoritarian rule. As a result, the impact of these parties on democracy has been unclear and difficult to discern. Yet, using a novel data set with observations from postcommunist Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, I find that the exit of authoritarian ruling parties from power and their subsequent reinvention as committed democratic competitors are powerfully associated with robust democratic party competition. Mixed effects regressions and estimates of treatment effects show that authoritarian exit and reinvention promote the success of democratic party competition.

Keywords

authoritarian successor parties party competition quality of democracy

Introduction

How do authoritarian ruling parties and their successors shape postauthoritarian democracies? Specifically, how does their exit from power and subsequent transformation influence party competition? Even after their grip on power ends, many formerly authoritarian ruling parties continue to participate in politics. Strikingly, many of these parties reinvent themselves into democratic competitors, renouncing authoritarianism, accepting democratic norms, and transforming their organizations, symbols, and programs accordingly. Yet we know little about the consequences of authoritarian exit and reinvention on subsequent party competition: how vigorous or volatile it is. By examining these strategies, we can resolve some of the confusion about the impact of authoritarian successor parties on democratic competition. Using a novel data set, this article finds that authoritarian exit and reinvention are powerfully associated with robust political party competition.

Authoritarian ruling parties, whether single ruling parties or hegemonic parties that tolerate some competition, are as dominant as they are a durable form of autocracy. They comprise over half (57%) of the autocratic regimes from 1950 to 2006 (Magaloni & Kricheli, 2010). Their prevalence has actually increased over time (Reuter & Gandhi, 2010, p. 88). They are stable and sturdy, partly because they can resolve the critical problems of coopting society and credibly sharing power among elites (Geddes, 1999, p. 132; Svolík, 2012). Their ranks include the communist rulers that dominated the politics of the 27 countries of the former Soviet Bloc, and who continue to exert a political monopoly in China, Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam. They have also been prevalent in Africa, where their rule has followed colonial liberation, and has buttressed (or simply veiled) strong man rule in many cases (Riedl, 2014). Authoritarian ruling parties also include hegemonic parties that allowed nominal competition in countries such as Malaysia, Taiwan until 2000, Singapore and Indonesia until 1998, Senegal, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, Kenya, and Gabon after the 1990s, and the PRI in Mexico until 2000.

These parties rule by penetrating society with enormous organizations and bureaucratic rule (notably in the German Democratic Republic, and in many other communist parties of the former Soviet Bloc), but also by serving as an organizational veneer for personalistic rule (as in Romania, Ghana, Iraq, or Gabon.) Their ideologies have ranged from Marxism (the Soviet Bloc, Angola, Mozambique, etc.) to socialism (Tunisia, Senegal, Nicaragua) to secular state-building (Turkey and Mexico) to conservative rule in the name of national security (South Korea, Singapore, or Malaysia.)

In short, these parties are as widespread and diverse as they are resilient. Yet their hold on power can end. The loss of their monopoly on policymaking, elite selection, and security signals a regime collapse (cf. Geddes et al., 2014). Parties can react to the collapse of their regimes in several ways. First, they may retain a role in governance, even if it means sharing office. Alternatively, they can exit government altogether. If they exit, they face a second choice: whether to dissolve or remain on the political scene. If they remain, their successors¹ face a third choice: whether to retain their orthodox/authoritarian commitments or transform themselves into democratic competitors.

These decisions, and especially the factors that allowed some authoritarian ruling parties to reinvent themselves after the collapse of their rule, have been examined extensively. The most spectacular case of such reinvention were some of the ruling communist parties in East Central Europe (Bozóki & Ishiyama, 2002; Grzymala-Busse, 2002; Haughton, 2004; Ishiyama, 1995, 2001; Mahr & Nagle, 1995; Orenstein, 1998; Pop-Eleches, 1999; Waller, 1995; Ziblatt, 1998). As a result, we know quite a bit about how and why authoritarian ruling parties adapt to democracy. Elite skills, material resources, and favorable reputations inherited from the previous regime, subnational organizations, and international incentives all made it possible for these parties to weather and to survive the transition to democracy (Cyr, 2017; Langston, 2017; Loxton, 2015; Miller, 2017).

Yet we know far less about the consequences of authoritarian exit and reinvention for subsequent regimes. The considerable literatures on authoritarian reinvention and party competition have rarely engaged each other.² It is these choices and their legacies that are examined here. If successor parties are often the single most salient inheritance from previous authoritarian single-party rule, then we need to know more about their impact on subsequent politics, and the democratic party competition that may follow.

This article makes three contributions to our understanding of the legacies of authoritarian party rule. First, it argues that the strategies of authoritarian ruling parties significantly influence subsequent democratic party competition. Specifically, the parties’ exit from power and their reinvention as committed democrats have a strong positive influence on the quality of party competition, electoral democracy, and the stabilization of party systems. As the most formidable potential opponents to democracy, and as both the chief target and source of criticism, they are critical players in ways that other political parties are not.

Second, we need to distinguish how authoritarian ruling parties respond to the collapse of their rule. Much of the current literature fails to discern between reinvented and orthodox parties, and it treats authoritarian successor parties as functionally equivalent. Yet an authoritarian ruling party that reinvents itself sheds its ideological and organizational ballast and becomes a democratic political actor can bolster nascent democratic party competition. In contrast, an authoritarian ruling party that is reluctant to leave power and continues to rely on its favorable access to state resources, autocratic ideology, and extant elite networks is likely to undermine, if not stifle, democratic party competition.

Third, this article presents a novel data set that maps the rule, performance, and transformation of authoritarian ruling parties and their successors. The analyses in this article rely on these data and show that the authoritarian ruling parties’ responses to the collapse of their rule are important factors in shaping party competition. Authoritarian ruling party exit and reinvention facilitate higher quality democratic party competition. In the sections that follow, I first map the responses of authoritarian ruling parties to the collapse of their rule. Third section presents the competing explanations and how party strategies influence competition. The new data set is discussed in the fourth section (“Data”). The fifth and sixth sections present the empirical models and their findings.

Party Responses to Regime Collapse

What happens when an authoritarian ruling party regime collapses? A regime collapse consists of the end of the party’s monopoly on power: on policymaking, on elite selection, and on security (see Geddes et al., 2014). It may be the result of exogenous factors such as the withdrawal of international sponsorship or global economic crises, or it may be the fault of internal factors such as elite conflict or the mobilization of popular protest.³

The parties themselves can respond in several ways, mapped in Figure 1. First, they may exit power and leave national government office. Alternatively, these parties can refuse to leave and continue to cling onto office, even if it means sharing power or playing a diminished role in office.⁴ In these latter cases, the authoritarian ruling party was not replaced entirely by another incumbent, and served as either a majority or minority governing party. Among the countries where authoritarian ruling parties had governed over 1945–2015 and then faced a regime collapse, 79% of the parties exited power, and only 21% retained it either wholly or partially. Unsurprisingly, most ruling authoritarian parties have had difficulty holding onto office when their regime collapsed and so their monopoly on policymaking, elite selection, and security ended. Nonetheless, even discredited and greatly weakened incumbents may not exit power, especially if the opposition is weak. For example, the communist regime collapsed in Romania in late 1989, but the party itself held onto power for months afterward.

Figure 1.

Authoritarian party strategies following authoritarian regime collapse.

For those parties that exit power, one immediate imperative is how to survive outside of office. About 49% of the parties that exit power fail to do so, and dissolve. Their dissolution means that they are no longer collective political actors: Their elites may go on to political careers, but the party has ceased to exist (see Loxton, 2015). The other 51% remain on the political scene as active players. Exit from power is thus conceptually distinct from organizational dissolution: There are many incumbents who have to leave power, but do not disappear. Conversely, leaders may choose to dissolve parties both during and after the exit from power. For example, President Mathieu Kérékou sacrificed the ruling PRPB (which had begun to transform itself in order to regain consolidated rule) in order to maintain his individual position in Benin in 1990 (Riedl, 2014, p. 166). Overall, then, 20% of authoritarian ruling parties retained power after the collapse of their regime, and 39% disappeared, as the italicized numbers in Figure 1 indicate.

Finally, parties that exit and survive then face the choice of whether to retain their orthodox ideological, programmatic, and symbolic commitments, or to abandon these and reinvent themselves as democratic actors. About 14% parties exited power but did not change their organizations or ideology, and continued to espouse orthodox authoritarian ideals, counting on a loyal if unhappy electorate. Such orthodox successor parties emerged in the Czech Republic and in East Germany, respectively, and a neo-orthodox communist party survived in Slovakia along a shorter-lived (and reinvented) main communist successor party. Several authoritarian ruling parties remained unchanged in name, ideology, or organization, as in Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and Georgia.

In contrast, a quarter of authoritarian parties reinvented themselves as democrats after exiting power. Democratic reinvention, for its part, is a costly proposition and no easy task. First, authoritarian ruling parties have to denounce authoritarian rule and accept the very democratic rules of the game they had earlier opposed, such as free elections. Reinvention thus requires programmatic transformation. This ideological change needs to be credible to skeptical electorates, requiring programmatic consistency, elite cohesion, and the disciplining of the new party organizations. The parties’ commitment to democratic competition is then made credible by their participation in elections and their strict compliance with electoral results, whether they bring loss or victory (Przeworski, 1991). Second, exit means that the parties abandon the comforts of governance and incumbency. They can no longer simply rely on state resources to buy votes or fund campaigns. To make ideological transformation credible and to run efficient electoral campaigns, parties need to abandon their existing organizational advantages, dissolving local organizations, and jettisoning old allies such as trade unions. Parties re-organize to eliminate brakes on further transformation such as orthodox factions or members. As a result, the strategy of “survival through continuity” of relying on past reputations or organizations (Cyr, 2017, see also Loxton, 2018) or “concession from strength” (Slater & Wong, 2013, see also Albertus & Menaldo, 2018) is not available to parties seeking reinvention. Finally, parties change their names and symbols to be consistent with their new democratic commitments and remove the discredited top leadership from the party.

The aim of reinvention is regained democratic access to governmental power: the capacity to successfully compete for and enter democratic government. Thus, several communist successor parties transformed themselves and eventually reentered government, this time as freely elected and often wildly popular democratic parties. These are among the most spectacular examples of the transformation of authoritarian ruling parties after the collapse of their rule. Communist parties in Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Slovakia reinvented themselves immediately and radically after the collapse of communist rule in 1989, becoming centrist social democratic parties. Other parties transformed later, especially those who maintained control during the collapse and enjoyed early electoral success as relatively orthodox formations, as in Bulgaria or Romania. Outside of postcommunist parties, another example of reinvention can be found in Cape Verde, where the Marxist African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde (PAICV) lost power in 1991 and reinvented itself as a social democratic party (Jourde, 2008, p. 86).

Reinvention is not an either-or proposition: many parties radically transform in some ways but not others. Thus, the Mexican Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) did not respond to its loss of power in 2000 by changing its name or its ideology. Instead, it decentralized its organization and the resources at its disposal, shifting power to heterogeneous regional governors and local leaders (Estevez et al., 2008, p. 43). These regional bastions of power were critical to its survival, and to its return to power in the presidential elections of 2012. In Nicaragua, the Sandinista National Liberation Front exited power in 1990, and held onto its organization and assets. It subsequently split over its leader’s (Daniel Ortega) heavy-handedness and moderated its ideology. A similarly limited reinvention is the Congolese Party of Labor (PCT.) After the collapse of its rule in 1991, the party introduced multiparty elections in 1992. It kept its name but repudiated its Marxist ideology, and adopted a pro-development perspective, only to return to rule in a coup in 1997 as a largely personalist party supporting the increasingly authoritarian rule of President Denis Sassou-Nguessou. It is thus coded as partially reinvented from 1992 to 1997, and then as an authoritarian ruling party subsequently. Conversely, the Zambian UNIP, for example, did not change its name, even as it underwent a massive transformation otherwise over 1990-1991 (see Riedl, 2014, pp. 158–160). Nor is the extent of the reinvention always clear: for example, the Taiwanese KMT purged activists and legislators blamed for the party’s defeat in 2000, reregistered members, and changed candidate selection rules (Cheng 2008), but other observers concluded that the party “had nonetheless failed to re-invent itself and to effectively consolidate its party leadership and rank-and-file” (Wong, 2008).

Importantly, electoral success and reinvention are distinct. Orthodoxy can win elections, and reinvention does not guarantee votes. Some parties returned to power without transforming themselves, as in the case of the Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC) in Ghana (Riedl, 2014). Much like the Socialist Party (PS) in Senegal, the PNDC “conceded from strength” (Slater & Wong, 2013) and then made no effort to transform its organization, ideology, or even name. Instead, the PNDC “ultimately decided to maintain the authoritarian incumbent party organization in its entirety, transporting the party wholesale into the multiparty era as the vehicle for garnering victory” (Riedl, 2014, p. 134). The wholesale transplantation meant that the new National Defence Council (NDC) retained its party symbols, elites, programs, and organizational networks, with a one-word change in the name as the sole concession. Similarly, the Communist Party of Moldova remained avowedly communist and nonetheless won the 2001 free elections. Four years later it changed its program and won again, this time on an anti-Russian, pro–European Union (EU) platform, advocating cutting taxes and promoting private sector growth (Ishiyama, 2008, see also March, 2005).

Nor does reinvention ensure continued survival. Fully 28% of authoritarian successors that successfully exited, avoided dissolution, and reinvented themselves eventually collapsed. Several reinvented authoritarian parties won elections in the 1990s only to wither away in the 2000s, as was the case in Poland and in Hungary. They were often victims of their own success, setting up high standards for competence and probity they had earlier set up. Importantly for the argument presented here, these collapses had deleterious effects for party competition in these countries (Grzymala-Busse, 2018).

Explaining Authoritarian Influence on Democratic Party Competition

These distinctions between reinvented and orthodox authoritarian successor parties are critical in resolving existing confusion about the relationship of authoritarian successor parties to democracy and to democratic party competition. Put simply, not all authoritarian successor parties are alike: and precisely because they differ, they are likely to have distinct political effects. Yet most current scholarship does not differentiate between authoritarian parties that cling to power and those who exit government, or between those parties that transform themselves and those who retain their ideological and other commitments. The result is series of “double-edged effects” (Loxton, 2018, p. 25), or to put it more bluntly, a confusing welter of findings about the parties’ role in postauthoritarian regimes.

Thus, the existing scholarship offers two sets of contradictory findings about the meaning of electoral support for authoritarian successor parties, and the parties’ subsequent role in new democracies. In one set of analyses, the legacies of authoritarian ruling parties hamper democracy. Among the different autocratic regimes, the collapse of authoritarian ruling party regimes is the least likely to lead to democracy. Only 24% of single-party regimes become democracies (Magaloni & Kricheli, 2010, pp. 125 and 135). Where the authoritarian ruling parties persist, they have an adverse effect on democracy, in effect “gaming” and undermining democratic procedure to their own benefit, rather than contributing to it substantively (Albertus & Menaldo, 2014; Flores-Macías, 2018). They can trigger authoritarian regression, prop up subnational authoritarian enclaves, and hinder transitional justice (Loxton, 2018).

On the other hand, other research has found that the persistence of authoritarian parties bolsters democracy, because they function as an institutional insurance: a way of protecting the interests of the autocratic elites and incorporating potential spoilers (Wright & Escriba-Folch, 2011, see also Ziblatt, 2018). Strong authoritarian incumbents are a focal point for the opposition and help to structure subsequent party competition (Riedl, 2014). Furthermore, the parties’ extensive patronage networks help them mobilize votes, increase representation, and increase the likelihood both of party survival and success after the collapse of authoritarian rule. Indeed, in Taiwan, South Korea, and Indonesia, authoritarian ruling parties initiated democratic transitions, continued to thrive, and did not exploit their advantage (Slater & Wong, 2013, 2018). In short, in these accounts authoritarian ruling parties need not transform themselves, or even fully accept democracy, to strengthen democratic party competition.

Yet if authoritarian successor parties differ in their responses to the collapse of their rule, and in their subsequent ideological and programmatic commitments, then their relationship to democracy and competition should vary accordingly. First, the exit of authoritarian ruling parties creates a more level playing field: The authoritarian rulers lose their privileged formal access to the extensive state resources, and as a result, other competitors are not handicapped. By exiting power, these parties allow consensus to develop around these new rules of the game, increasing the quality of electoral competition. As they no longer have the privileged access to state resources and mobilizational power, they are more inclined to agree to free electoral competition as the one way to select governments, even if it means losing elections and exiting office. Such elite consensus and acceptance of elections is critical to the functioning of (and even defining) democracy (Przeworski, 1991; Przeworski et al., 2000).

In contrast, failure to exit, and the persistence of authoritarian institutions and practices can hamper competition and disadvantages of other parties (Arriola et al., 2017). If authoritarian ruling parties do not exit from power, they retain their enormous institutional advantages: access to the coercive apparatus, command of clientelist networks, access to state rents, and so on. These were critical to the parties’ authoritarian rule and would continue to buttress them (Smith, 2005). Such unfair advantages can be used to thwart a nascent opposition and to reconsolidate single-party rule under a competitive guise. Not surprisingly, for example, the exit of the communist parties from power has been found to be a necessary precondition for democratization (Darden & Grzymala-Busse, 2006; Fish, 1998; Kitschelt, 2003). Authoritarian exit should thus increase the quality of subsequent democratic party competition.

Exit can also influence party system volatility, or the switching of party electoral support for parties. Volatility is a fundamental and much-studied measure of the stability and institutionalization of party competition: how stable and predictable the set of party competitors becomes (see Birch, 2003). Exit should increase volatility almost mechanically, by opening up the space for new parties to enter and exit, and voters for change their party loyalties. Volatility appears to decline the longer a country is democratic, though the direction of causation is unclear (Birch, 2003; Lupu & Stokes, 2010; Tavits, 2005). Other scholars found that democratic consolidation is not associated with a decline in party volatility or with the effective number of parties competing (Mainwaring & Torcal, 2006; Roberts & Wibbels, 1999).⁵ Indeed, high electoral volatility may lead governing parties to lock in the benefits of officeholding and exploit the “weakness, division, and volatility of others to cement its predominance by degrading democratic competition” (Kitschelt, 2015, p. 83). Not surprisingly, then, scholars have found that volatility is orthogonal to the quality of democratic party competition (see Hicken & Kuhonta, 2011).

The reinvention of authoritarian successor parties should promote the quality of party competition: the degree to which it is free, fair, and committed to popular rule. By definition, reinvented authoritarian successor parties renounce autocratic rule and embrace democracy. They thus contribute to the consensus on the desirability of democracy and democratic competition. Rather than defending ancien regime interests or half-heartedly supporting the new regime, these parties commit themselves to democracy, cut their formal ties to state resources, and transform their organizations to better mobilize voters. Since their reinvention follows exit, parties cannot simply rely on clientelism or state resources to get re-elected. Precisely because they commit themselves to democratic competition rather than to continued extraction from the state, they have the incentive to bolster free electoral competition and party institutionalization, including a permissive legal framework (relatively low party registration requirements, funding transparency, state subsidies), powers and responsibilities delegated to political parties (representation, legislation, executive powers), institutions that do not favor specific parties a priori or target others, and the building of party branches, legislative offices, field offices, and so on.⁶ In such institutionalized systems, political parties fulfill the critical role of popular mobilization, electoral representation, and effective legislation. The mechanistic effects of authoritarian exit are now magnified by the active support by authoritarian successor parties for democratic party competition.

It is counterintuitive that these newly committed democrats would help to build democratic party competition. For one thing, authoritarian successor parties are the least likely democrats. As ruling authoritarian parties, they had spent most of their rule quashing democratic party competition. Yet when even the biggest historical obstacles to democracy and free party competition now accept them, party competition has the chance to develop and flourish with a lower risk of authoritarian backsliding or reversion. They have few incentives to create or to support robust institutions of party competition.

Second, authoritarian successor parties are also potentially the most formidable opponents of democracy: Daniel Ziblatt (2018) has shown that it is the support of these mainstays of the ancien regime that is critical to democratic success by coopting and neutralizing potential democratic spoilers. Had they chosen to, they could have done considerable damage to democracy. Conversely, parties that exit but do not abandon their commitment to the authoritarian regime, and insist on retaining their ideological orthodoxy, should continue to undermine party competition (conditional on their electoral success: small orthodox protest parties will have much less of an impact than widely supported ones). Thus, reinvention also has a positive externality: It helps to ensure that there are no anti-democratic or anti-system parties competing, as authoritarian successors would be the most likely candidates to serve as such parties.

Third, reinvented authoritarian parties become both the chief target and source of party competition (Grzymala-Busse, 2007). They are the chief target as they are often controversial and salient as one of the single most visible and important legacies of the ancien regime. For example, almost no governing coalitions formed between authoritarian successor parties and parties with origins in the anti-authoritarian opposition, because the acrimony of the “regime divide” trumped both ideological proximity and minimum winning coalition considerations (Druckman & Roberts, 2007; Grzymala-Busse, 2002). Reinvented successor parties are also a main source of robust party competition: The same skills required to transform their reputations and gain electoral support also made them trenchant critics and a powerful opposition to other parties. Unlike other parties, then, reinvented authoritarian successors serve as a focal point of vociferous criticism. These effects are multiplied by their popular support: The more votes the reinvented authoritarian successors receive, the more other parties criticize and attack them, and the more audible their own criticism. In short, the stronger electorally the reinvented parties, the more positive their impact.

Their centrality to party competition means reinvented successors can also influence party volatility. Popular and electorally powerful reinvented authoritarian successor parties pose an electoral threat to other parties. Elites of other parties would then coordinate against a common enemy, or simply leave the field in anticipation of a rout (Epperly, 2011; Tavits, 2008). We would thus expect that the more votes a reinvented authoritarian successor party gains, the lower the electoral volatility as a result. Conversely, the reinvention of authoritarian successor parties also reassures potential new entrants that they can oppose authoritarian successor parties without fear of retribution, leading more new parties to enter competition, offering new choices to voters. If this is the case, reinvented authoritarian successor parties should be associated with increased volatility.

Differentiating among authoritarian success parties thus provides clues to resolving the confusion around their role in new democracies. Exit and reinvention should promote democratic party competition. Authoritarian retention of power and continued orthodoxy should hamper it. Electoral support for authoritarian successor parties tout court tells us little about democratic party competition. Without distinguishing what the parties stand for, their existence and support hold little meaning for democracy. Furthermore, one reason why democratization may be so difficult is that close to three quarters of authoritarian ruling parties disappear, retain power, or retain their orthodox commitments (see Figure 1 and previous discussion). Such parties are ill-placed to protect or foster democratic party competition. In contrast, the minority that reinvented and accepted democracy may very well fight for democratic institutions, and bolster democracy and democratic competition.

Data

To examine the impact of authoritarian party exit and reinvention, I use a new source of data, the ASP (Authoritarian Successor Parties) data set. The data include 80 countries where authoritarian ruling parties had monopolized governance, spanning 1945–2015, for a total of 5,680 country-year observations. The present analysis of successor party strategies exclude those years when authoritarian ruling parties governed. Most of the observations are from Africa and postcommunist Europe and Eurasia. The data set includes newly collected measures of the strategies of adaptation to the collapse of party rule (exit, dissolution, reinvention) and the specifics of party reinvention (changes in name, symbols, organization, acceptance of democracy and renouncement of autocratic rule, new elites and new organizations, etc.)., as well as the vote share of authoritarian successor parties in subsequent elections.

The dependent variables are indicators of the quality of party competition. The first is Competition, an index measure of the competitiveness of party participation: the extent to which parties compete, participate politically, and ensure the peaceful transition from power. The source is the Polity IV parcomp variable. The second is Polyarchy: a measure of the quality of electoral democracy that measures how free, fair, and inclusive the political context is. The source is the VDem 6 v2x_polyarchy index variable, consisting of freedom of expression and association, share of population with suffrage, free and fair elections, and the degree to which the executive is elected (see the Supplemental Appendix for full codings). The third dependent variable is Volatility, a measure of the stability of political party systems that consists of the sum of the shares of individual party votes gained or lost from election to election,⁷ divided by two: $\sum_{i = 1}^{n} (\frac{| V o t e_{1} - V o t e_{0} |}{2})$ Each is measured in year $i$ in country $j$ .

The three contributing factors to the quality of democratic competition examined here are the exit of the authoritarian ruling party from power, its reinvention as a democratic party, and its electoral support.

Exit is the end of the party’s incumbency in national government office. The party is coded as exiting power if it is fully replaced in national office by another incumbent. If it was not replaced by another incumbent, or if the authoritarian ruling party retains a minority role in the new government, it is coded as retaining power. Regime collapse is distinct from authoritarian exit: even if an authoritarian ruling party regime collapses (the party loses its monopoly over elite selection, policymaking, or security), the party can still remain in government and fail to exit office.

Reinvention is an index variable that combines the factor loadings of three distinct variables: the acceptance of democracy, organizational change in the party, and change of party name. A party is coded as having accepted democracy if its officials publicly declare or its programs state that the party supports a new democratic system and free elections. A party is coded as having undergone organizational change if it changes the structures of organizations at any level (local, regional, national, and parliamentary, as well as auxiliary organizations such as paramilitary, women’s or youth groups) or if it creates new ones at any of these levels. Reinvention is the weighted sum of these individual items, in that order of importance. The results are robust to other specifications, including as simple additive index that added the individual variable scores, and a summary measure that relies on the parties’ renunciation of autocracy and acceptance of democracy, as evidenced by their official statement and programmatic declarations. Several other aspects of party transformation and reinvention are also measured, but not included in the current analysis.⁸

Vote is the percentage of the vote received by authoritarian successor parties, whether reinvented or orthodox, in the preceding election. Each is measured in year $i$ in country $j$ . In contrast to exit and reinvention, the vote should have no independent impact on the quality of party competition, as Vote does not differentiate between support for reinvented and for orthodox successor parties.

Control variables include electoral institutions (Presidential and PR, or proportional representation) that have been found to influence the quality of party competition. Presidential systems hinder a transition from single to multiparty rule (Jourde, 2008), and the combination of presidential systems with proportional representation is an especially unfortunate one for democratization (Mainwaring, 1993).⁹ In contrast, proportional representation is a proxy for permissive electoral systems that allow more parties to enter and survive in the political arena, enhancing at least initially the quality of party competition (see Clark & Golder, 2006; Cox, 1997; Shugart & Carey, 1992). The Postcommunist variable is a dummy variable for status as a postcommunist regime. It serves as a proxy for regional effects, former membership in the Soviet sphere of influence, and the often-debilitating legacies of communism. Communist parties tended to adopt similar organizational templates, with extensive reach into society and the economy. These vary by country but not by year and are thus indexed by $j$ .

Finally, economic development (Log GDP, the natural log of the GDP per capita) has been used as a proxy for state capacity, political development, and other factors facilitating democratization and democratic stability (World Bank, 2019). In a range of studies, it has been found to strongly correlate to democracy, even if the mechanisms are subject to heated debate (see, for example, Boix & Stokes, 2003; Przeworski et al., 2000; Przeworski & Limongi, 1997). It varies by country and by year, and so it is indexed by year $i$ in country $j$ . All these variable summaries and codings can be found in the Supplemental Appendix.

The full data set also includes other assessments of democracy and party competition (from the VDem6, VDem8, and Polity IV data sets), measures of parliamentary fragmentation, and the effective number of electoral and parliamentary parties (Bormann & Golder, 2013), as well as other control variables such as geopolitical region, population size, and economic development.

To assess the relationship between authoritarian exit, reinvention, and vote on the one hand, and the measures of party competition on the other, I use three empirical strategies. First, as detailed in the section below, I use a mixed effects model to estimate the associations between these variables, and present the findings in section 5. To substantiate causation, in the “Substantiating Causation” section I use two-stage least squares models (2SLS) with instrumental variables on the full data set, and a difference-in-difference design on a subset.

Mixed Effects Model

The observations consist of country years, and cluster by country. I therefore use a multilevel model with both fixed and random effects.¹⁰ Mixed effect or hierarchical linear models (HLM) take account of the correlations between the error terms and allow us to estimate both the effects at the level of country-year variables (“Level 1”) and how these vary across countries (“Level 2.”) The coefficients for the Level 2 fixed effects are estimated directly, and interpreted as analogous to standard regression coefficients. The Level 1 random effects are not directly estimated: instead, they take the form of either random intercepts or random slopes, and are interpreted as the variance around Level 1 coefficient estimates as we move across countries. As the “meaning” of exit and reinvention can vary by country, I estimate random slope models, which allow both the intercepts and the slope of the exit and reinvention to vary by country.

Below, I first describe the individual country-year model (Level 1), followed by equations explaining the Level 2 (country) coefficients of the Level 1 model.

Level 1:

C o m p e t i t i o n_{i j} = β_{0 j} + β_{1 j} (R e i n v e n t_{i j}) + β_{2 j} (V o t e_{i j}) + β_{3 j} (l o g G D P_{i j}) + e_{i j},

where $R e i n v e n t_{i j}$ is a dummy for authoritarian party reinvention that year, $V o t e_{i j}$ is the share of the vote, and $l o g G D P_{i j}$ is the natural log of GDP.

The coefficients on exit or reinvention at the country-year (level 1) are a function of Level 2 predictors:

\begin{array}{l} β_{0 j} = γ_{00} + u_{0 j}, \\ β_{1 j} = γ_{10} + γ_{11} P o s t c o m m_{j} + γ_{12} P R_{j} + γ_{13} P r e s_{j} + u_{1 j}, \\ β_{2 j} = γ_{20} + u_{2 j}, \\ β_{3 j} = γ_{30} + u_{2 j}, \end{array}

where $P o s t c o m m_{j}$ is the dummy variable for postcommunist status of country $j$ , $P R_{j}$ is a dummy variable for proportional representation in country $j$ , $P r e s_{j}$ is the dummy variable for the Presidential system of country $j$ , and the $u_{1 j}$ term is the country level random effect after accounting for Postcomm, PR and Pres.

Mixed Model:

\begin{matrix} C o m p e t i t i o n_{i j} = γ_{00} + γ_{10} R e i n v e n t_{i j} + γ_{20} V o t e_{i j} + γ_{30} l o g G D P_{i j} \\ + u_{1 j} R e i n v e n t_{i j} + u_{2 j} V o t e_{i j} + + u_{3 j} l o g G D P_{i j} \\ + γ_{11} P o s t c o m m_{j} + γ_{12} P R_{j} + γ_{13} P r e s_{j} + u_{0 j} + e_{i j}, \end{matrix}

The Impact of Authoritarian Exit

I first examine the impact of authoritarian exit: the voluntary or forced departure from governance of authoritarian ruling parties. As noted earlier, when their regime begins to collapse, 80% of authoritarian parties exit power.

As expected, the exit of authoritarian ruling parties is associated with free and unconstrained political competition, as Figure 2 summarizes (the full results are in Table 1). We see a strong positive correlation between the authoritarian ruling party exit and both Competition and Polyarchy: the extent to which party competition is meaningful and parties can compete freely, without harassment, prohibitions, or constraints. Such an exit evens the playing field: powerful and entrenched authoritarian ruling parties lose their formal and direct access to state coffers and offices, making it far more difficult to rely on these as democratic competitors. Where they do not exit power, authoritarian ruling parties act as a brake on free competition: Their exit from power allows a more level playing field among the new competitors, who do not have easy access to material or organizational resources. These results are very similar for the Polyarchy dependent variable, as Table 1 shows. These results offer a counterpoint to the findings that authoritarian regimes give rise to successful political parties (Levitsky et al., 2016). Even if individual political parties benefit from authoritarian continuity, the quality of political party competition does not. We further see no association between Exit and Volatility, suggesting that the exit of authoritarian parties by itself does not increase the opportunities for entry and exit of competitors.

Figure 2.

Authoritarian party exit and other predictors of the quality of party competition.

Table 1.

Authoritarian Exit Is Associated With Quality of Party Competition.

	Competition	Polyarchy	Volatility
ASP exit	0.62*** (0.11) [0.00]	0.03* (0.02) [0.09]	0.67 (6.39) [0.92]
ASP vote	0.00*** (0.00) [0.00]	−0.00 (0.00) [0.15]	−0.04 (0.07) [0.52]
Postcommunist	−0.42* (0.22) [0.05]	−0.04 (0.05) [0.45]	15.94*** (5.42) [0.00]
Log GDP	0.18*** (0.04) [0.00]	0.03*** (0.01) [0.00]	−10.03*** (1.78) [0.00]
PR	0.22*** (0.05) [0.00]	−0.00 (0.01) [0.79]	−11.20*** (2.08) [0.00]
Presidential system	−0.80*** (0.14) [0.00]	−0.19*** (0.03) [0.00]	6.31 (4.85) [0.19]
Constant	2.12*** (0.35) [0.00]	0.40*** (0.07) [0.00]	114.88*** (16.92) [0.00]
SD (exit country slope)	0.15 (0.19) [0.14]	0.02*** (0.01) [0.00]	27.76*** (7.67) [0.00]
SD (country mean)	0.91 (0.19) [0.66]	0.17*** (0.02) [0.00]	15.19*** (6.28) [0.00]
Correlation (exit, mean)	−6.80 (78.89) [0.93]	8.70 (5,389.49) [1.00]	−2.51 (2.55) [0.33]
SD (residual)	0.35*** (0.01) [0.00]	0.07*** (0.00) [0.00]	15.63*** (0.45) [0.00]
N	894	886	677

ASP = Authoritarian Successor Parties; PR = proportional representation. Standard errors are in parentheses; p values are in brackets.

p < .10. ** p < .05. *** p < .01.

The other variables have the expected coefficients. The coefficients on the postcommunist dummy variable suggest that the legacies of the communist regime are negatively associated with the quality of political competition and programmatic differences among parties. This is not surprising: While the East Central European postcommunist countries have made the transition to democracy in almost all cases, the vast majority of the republics that arose from the ashes of the Soviet Union itself have careened between authoritarian and semi-authoritarian status. Predictably, wealth is associated with more free and fair competition (and with democracy more broadly). Similarly, proportional representation and presidentialism have the expected coefficients: The former is associated with higher quality party competition, the latter with considerably lower.

The Impact of Authoritarian Reinvention

What, then, about the impact of the reinvention of authoritarian successor parties? As noted earlier, once the parties exit power, former authoritarian ruling parties can choose to reinvent themselves: to reject authoritarian rules and regimes and fully accept democratic competition, to transform their symbols and party platforms accordingly, and to transform their organizations by jettisoning paramilitary organizations, auxiliary organizations, and orthodox activists and members who would stymie the acceptance of democratic competition. A fourth of authoritarian ruling parties followed this path: reinventing themselves as democratic competitors, and signaling commitment to democracy by its most formidable former opponent. Such turnarounds, especially from the parties that previously ruled as authoritarian monopolists, should have an impact on party competition.

The results show that authoritarian party reinvention is strongly associated with the competitiveness of party systems and high quality of electoral democracy, as Figure 3 summarizes and Table 2 details. These positive correlations ought to be magnified when the reinvented authoritarian successor parties are especially powerful electorally. The vote for authoritarian successor parties by itself has no substantive association with party competition or electoral democracy. However, if the vote for authoritarian successor parties alone does not matter, a vote for reinvented authoritarian successors should. To test this conditional relationship, I interact the reinvention of the authoritarian successor parties and their votes. Figure 4 graphs the marginal effect of authoritarian party reinvention on the quality of party competition at various values of the vote for the authoritarian successor parties (the 95% confidence interval is in the parentheses.) The positive relationship indicates that as the vote for the reinvented parties increases, so does the positive relationship between reinvention and the quality of party competition. A caveat applies: There are very few cases where authoritarian successor parties gain the majority of the vote in elections, and so the confidence intervals increase accordingly (fewer than 1% of country-year observations consist of authoritarian successor parties obtaining 45% or more.)

Figure 3.

Authoritarian party reinvention and other predictors of the quality of party competition.

Table 2.

Authoritarian Reinvention Is Associated With Quality of Party Competition.

	Competition	Polyarchy	Volatility
ASP reinvention	0.26** (0.11) [0.02]	0.07** (0.03) [0.02]	9.78** (4.95) [0.05]
ASP vote	0.00 (0.00) [0.38]	−0.00 (0.00) [0.79]	−0.19** (0.08) [0.01]
Postcommunist	−1.04*** (0.29) [0.00]	−0.15** (0.07) [0.04]	10.15 (9.84) [0.30]
Log GDP	0.22*** (0.06) [0.00]	0.01 (0.01) [0.16]	−21.13*** (2.74) [0.00]
PR	0.28*** (0.06) [0.00]	−0.03*** (0.01) [0.01]	−1.42 (2.36) [0.55]
Presidential system	−0.91*** (0.19) [0.00]	−0.23*** (0.04) [0.00]	1.43 (7.27) [0.84]
Constant	2.74*** (0.49) [0.00]	0.66*** (0.10) [0.00]	209.91*** (26.42) [0.00]
SD (reinvention slope)	0.31** (0.16) [0.03]	0.09*** (0.03) [0.00]	14.37*** (4.21) [0.00]
SD (country mean)	0.68* (0.15) [0.08]	0.18*** (0.03) [0.00]	16.66*** (4.04) [0.00]
Correlation (reinvention, mean)	0.23 (0.35) [0.51]	−0.06 (0.35) [0.87]	0.19 (0.37) [0.62]
SD (residual)	0.33*** (0.01) [0.00]	0.06*** (0.00) [0.00]	13.80*** (0.51) [0.00]
N	524	508	419

ASP = Authoritarian Successor Parties; PR = proportional representation. Standard errors are in parentheses; p values are in brackets.

p < .10. ** p < .05. *** p < .01.

Figure 4.

Marginal effects of authoritarian party reinvention on competition.

Reinvention also has a peculiar relationship with volatility: It has a strong positive independent association, but a negative marginal one. The vote for undifferentiated authoritarian successor parties has a negative relationship to electoral volatility (see Table 2). As the expected relationship between reinvention and competition ought to be magnified by electoral support, however, I interact the vote for the authoritarian successor parties with reinvention and calculate the marginal effects. As Figure 5 shows, as the vote for authoritarian successor parties increases, the marginal effect of reinvention is to lower volatility. Here, the entry of reinvented authoritarian parties increases volatility independently, but their growing electoral power decreases it. These results are consistent with the findings of Kitschelt et al. (1999), Tavits, (2008) and Epperly (2011) that elite strategic coordination and subsequent party entry/exit lower electoral volatility.¹¹

Figure 5.

Marginal effects of authoritarian party reinvention on volatility.

The Impact of the Vote for Undifferentiated Authoritarian Successors

If distinguishing between reinvented and orthodox authoritarian successor parties is as critical as these findings suggest, then failing to differentiate empirically between the two kinds of parties should produce inconclusive findings. Accordingly, the results in Table 3 show that the vote for authoritarian successor parties by itself, without distinguishing between reinvented and orthodox parties, has no association with the quality of party competition, the quality of elections, or electoral volatility. The Vote variable simply measures the electoral support for the authoritarian successor party. It does not differentiate between parties that committed themselves to democracy and those who retained many of their authoritarian commitments. Not surprisingly, then, the impact of the vote for authoritarian successor parties on the quality of competition is negligible, since it includes support both for committed democratic parties, and for the ardent supporters of autocracy. This may also help to explain the contradictory findings in the existing literature regarding the impact of such parties on subsequent democracy.

Table 3.

Vote for (Undifferentiated) Successor Parties Is Not Correlated to Quality of Competition.

	Competition	Polyarchy	Volatility
Vote	0.00 (0.00) [0.27]	−0.00 (0.00) [0.90]	0.16 (0.19) [0.39]
Postcommunist	−0.23 (0.18) [0.20]	−0.00 (0.04) [1.00]	9.34* (5.31) [0.08]
Log GDP	0.23*** (0.04) [0.00]	0.04*** (0.01) [0.00]	−12.65*** (1.74) [0.00]
PR	0.16*** (0.05) [0.00]	0.01 (0.01) [0.34]	−9.30*** (2.14) [0.00]
Presidential system	−0.36** (0.14) [0.01]	−0.07** (0.03) [0.02]	−2.09 (4.81) [0.66]
Constant	1.99*** (0.32) [0.00]	0.32*** (0.07) [0.00]	145.95*** (16.49) [0.00]
SD (vote country slope)	0.02*** (0.00) [0.00]	0.00*** (0.00) [0.00]	1.04 (0.18) [0.85]
SD (country mean)	0.74*** (0.08) [0.00]	0.19*** (0.02) [0.00]	16.88*** (2.64) [0.00]
Correlation (vote, mean)	−0.62*** (0.18) [0.00]	−0.66*** (0.17) [0.00]	−0.89*** (0.23) [0.00]
SD (residual)	0.33*** (0.01) [0.00]	0.06*** (0.00) [0.00]	13.60*** (0.37) [0.00]
N	985	974	762

PR = proportional representation. Standard errors are in parentheses; p values are in brackets.

p < .10. ** p < .05. *** p < .01.

Substantiating Causation

One concern about the analysis of the impact of authoritarian ruling parties and their successors on party competition is causal identification. In accounting for democratization, for example, the authoritarian exit has been found to be such a powerful correlate (Fish, 1998) that critics have charged that it is too “causally proximal” and indistinguishable from the process of democratization itself (Kitschelt, 2003). Factors such as differences in the communist regime’s strategies and capacities of rule (Kitschelt et al., 1999) or differences in the ethnic composition of the countries (Rovny, 2014; Vachudova & Snyder, 1996) may have both led the authoritarian ruling parties to adopt particular strategies, and created a set of favorable preconditions for democracy. Going back further in time, the sequencing of national consciousness and the imposition of the communist regime (Darden & Grzymala-Busse, 2006) created tension between national aspirations and communist rule that would have led both to a rejection of the communist system, and its main representatives, the communist parties. Thus, the kind of regimes that fostered authoritarian parties with the ability to exit and to reinvent themselves were also more likely to democratize.

The quality of party competition is less likely to have such similar and unknowable roots. The structure and dynamics of party competition are the result of not only historical endowments but also contemporary and exogenous forces: (a) international pressure for elections and aid to political parties, (b) institutional choices, which often reflected inaccurate elite expectations over institutional outcomes, and how they would benefit these elites (see Albertus & Menaldo, 2018; Bernhard, 2000), and (c) the entry of multiple and unpredictable new competitors, ranging from resurrected historical parties to brand new formations with roots in neither the old regime nor the opposition to it. Nonetheless, this is observational data, and, in common with nearly all national-level factors, neither authoritarian exit nor reinvention was randomly assigned.

Thus, to gain greater confidence in the causal relationship between authoritarian successor party strategies and subsequent quality of party competition, I use instrumental variable and difference-in-difference designs to identify the ways in which exit and reinvention contribute to democratic competition.

First, I use a two-stage least squares regression with an instrumental variable. To satisfy the exclusion restriction, the instrumental variable must be orthogonal to the outcome (party competition), but related to the variable of interest (reinvention.) In other words, the instrument must be unrelated to the error term in the original regression equation, by assumption. To satisfy the relevance condition, the instrumental variable must be strongly related to reinvention.

As an instrument, I use the development of party organizations (VDem 8 v2xpsorgs variable).¹² As the nondemocratic nature of institutionalized authoritarian ruling parties shows, party organizations do not imply democratic party competition, nor does democratic party competition imply either the strength or type of party organization. We find extensive and strong party organizations both in democracies and in autocratic single-party regimes. Indeed, as Hicken and Kuhonta note, “institutionalized party systems may or may not be consolidated democracies” (Hicken & Kuhonta, 2011, p. 575). In short, party organizations are orthogonal to democracy: both democracies and autocracies can have robust networks of party organizations.

Yet for authoritarian successor parties, party organizations are a critical aspect of party reinvention and the eventual electoral success of these parties (see Tavits, 2012, 2013). They make parties stronger competitors, without having a direct effect on either the quality of democratic competition or the electoral context. As a result, we can be reasonably sure that any effect we see on democratic party competition could only be “channeled” by party reinvention.

If party organizations can only influence party competition through reinvention, then authoritarian successor party reinvention has a positive causal impact on the the quality of party competition. As we can see from the first-stage results in Table 4, the coefficients on instrumented reinvention are all high, positive, and statistically significant. The instrument is relevant: the first stage F statistics of the joint significance of the instruments’ coefficients are well above the conventional threshold of 10 established by Staiger and Stock (1997) (see Stock & Yogo, 2005, for more precise and formalized tests of whether the instruments are weak.) I calculate the coverage sets/confidence intervals and the p value using the conditional likelihood ratio (CLR) procedure introduced in Moreira (2003) and developed further by Mikusheva and Poi (2006).¹³ The p value, or the probability of obtaining these estimates given $H_{0}$ of $β (R e i n v e n t i o n) = 0$ is 0.000. These results are robust to excluding covariates. I report the $R^{2}$ , although it is less useful in the context of two-stage least squares regressions.¹⁴

Table 4.

Two-Stage Least Squares Instrumental Variable (2SLS IV) Regressions.

	Competition	Polyarchy
Reinvention	2.173*** (0.29) [0.00]	0.379*** (0.04) [0.00]
Postcommunist	−1.133*** (0.18) [0.00]	−0.160*** (0.03) [0.00]
Log GDP	0.106 (0.08) [0.17]	0.035*** (0.01) [0.00]
PR	0.038 (0.14) [0.79]	0.014 (0.02) [0.56]
Presidential	0.466*** (0.15) [0.00]	0.089*** (0.03) [0.00]
Constant	3.281*** (0.64) [0.00]	0.358*** (0.10) [0.00]
First stage F	46.4	54.7
First stage R²	.21	.18
CLR coverage set	[1.72, 2.95]	[.308, .494]
p value	.00	.00
N	722	696

PR = proportional representation; CLR = conditional likelihood ratio. Standard errors are in parentheses; p values are in brackets.

p < .10. **p < .05. ***p < .01.

Second, I use a difference-in-difference design on a subset of the data, the postcommunist sample (see Abadie, 2005). By using only the postcommunist cases limits several confounders, such as regime type, durability, or economic profiles, and the variation in the timing of the authoritarian breakdown, since communist regimes collapsed in 1989–1991. Here, we use observations at two time periods, $T_{0}$ and $T_{1}$ , to estimate the causal effect of a given treatment in a nonrandomized setting by controlling for pretreatment differences. At time $T_{0}$ , all units are untreated; at $T_{1}$ , some are assigned to the treatment while others remain as controls. Assuming parallel trends (the change in average potential outcomes in the control group is the same as the change in treatment group had it not received the treatment), the comparison of the average outcome differences between the two time periods in the treated group to the control group estimates the causal effect of the treatment. We cannot test the parallel trends assumption directly, but the sample limits the potential distortions. I use the year of the regime breakdown as $T_{0}$ (1991 for the former Soviet Union republics, 1989 for all others in the communist bloc), and the dummy variables for exit and reinvention as the “treatments.”

The results shown in Table 5 suggest that both exit and reinvention have a causal effect and contribute to the quality of party competition. If we compare postcommunist countries where the authoritarian party exited and those where it did not, and assume that the average differences between the countries with and without an authoritarian exit remained constant, then the authoritarian exit improves the quality of party competition by .94 points (on a 0–5 scale, where 5 is a fully competitive system.) Similarly, authoritarian reinvention improves the quality of party competition by .87 points on a 0- to 5-point scale. This is a considerable shift in the competitiveness of the party system.

Table 5.

Difference in Difference Estimation Results (Outcome Variable: Party Competition).

Treatment: Exit				Treatment: Reinvention
	Before	After			Before	After
Control	145	28	173	Control:	417	45	462
Treated	597	28	625	Treated:	325	8	333
	742	56			742	53
Before				Before
Control	2.952			Control	3.101
Treated	3.583			Treated	3.920
Diff (T-C)	0.631***	(0.103)	[.000]	Diff (T-C)	0.819***	(0.080)	[.000]
After				After
Control	1.536			Control	2.044
Treated	3.107			Treated	3.750
Diff (T-C)	1.571***	(0.297)	[.000]	Diff (T-C)	1.706***	(0.413)	[.000]
Diff-in-Diff	0.940***	(0.314)	[.003]	Diff-in-Diff	0.886**	(0.420)	[.035]
R ²	.13	N: 798		R ²	.19	N: 795

Standard errors are in parentheses; p values are in brackets; critical results are in bold.

Conclusion

The influence of authoritarian ruling parties does not end with the collapse of their regimes. Even when their official monopoly on rule ends, their subsequent exit from power and their transformation (or failure to transform) into moderate democratic parties continue to structure political party competition. Where these parties exit power and reinvent themselves, they promote the rise of free, institutionalized, and robust party competition.

Authoritarian exit and reinvention appear to have a positive effect on the quality of party competition and electoral democracy. Authoritarian successors can thus enhance subsequent democratization—but only if they exit power fully and reinvent themselves as committed democrats. The vote for authoritarian parties by itself has no impact on these aspects of democracy—but that is because we cannot rely on simple measures of electoral support, and instead need to distinguish between votes for reinvented and for orthodox authoritarian successor parties. Once we do, the vote for reinvented authoritarian successor parties has a positive effect on the quality of party competition and electoral freedom. It further stabilizes party competition by lowering volatility.

These findings imply that we need to connect the insights of the literature on authoritarian party transformation with the literature on the structure of party competition. Doing so would allow us to answer several questions. For example, how does the ideology of the authoritarian ruling party matter in structuring subsequent electoral cleavages? Scholars have already identified that the axes of party competition differ from those in Western Europe or the United States (Evans & Whitefield, 1993; Kitschelt, 1992). In another example, how long do the legacies of party reinvention last—what is the “half-life” of this influence? Finally, do democratic parties transform themselves using similar strategies, and how do these changes influence subsequent party competition?

Above all, we need to distinguish among authoritarian successor parties, if we are to understand the legacies of authoritarian ruling parties for subsequent democratization. These parties are not all alike: and their different paths matter for their influence on subsequent party competition and other aspects of politics, governance, and policymaking. It is not surprising that the vote for authoritarian successor parties alone has no bearing on the quality of party democracy. Unless we distinguish the committed democrats from the authoritarian holdovers, their electoral support alone has little to tell us about the quality of party competition. The parties’ exit from power, and their reinvention as democratic political parties, on the other hand, do matter. They are strongly associated with quality of political party competition, and by extension, the functioning of liberal democracy.

Research Data

ASP_Submission_CPS_Final_Data – Supplemental material for Consequences of Authoritarian Party Exit and Reinvention for Democratic Competition

Supplemental material, ASP_Submission_CPS_Final_Data for Consequences of Authoritarian Party Exit and Reinvention for Democratic Competition by Anna Grzymala-Busse in Comparative Political Studies

Supplemental Material

ASP_Submission_CPS_Final_code – Supplemental material for Consequences of Authoritarian Party Exit and Reinvention for Democratic Competition

Supplemental material, ASP_Submission_CPS_Final_code for Consequences of Authoritarian Party Exit and Reinvention for Democratic Competition by Anna Grzymala-Busse in Comparative Political Studies

Supplemental Material

CPS_Appendix_Final – Supplemental material for Consequences of Authoritarian Party Exit and Reinvention for Democratic Competition

Supplemental material, CPS_Appendix_Final for Consequences of Authoritarian Party Exit and Reinvention for Democratic Competition by Anna Grzymala-Busse in Comparative Political Studies

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to John Jackson, Jamie Loxton, Scott Mainwaring, Monika Nalepa and the participants of workshops at the University of Kansas, University of Virginia, University of Oregon, Princeton University, and Tulane University for their very helpful conversations and comments.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: the author received support from the Carnegie Foundation for the research and authorship.

ORCID iD

Anna Grzymala-Busse

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online at the CPS website

Notes

Author Biography

Anna Grzymala-Busse is the Michelle and Kevin Douglas professor in the Department of Political Science, Stanford University. She is the author of three books and several articles on authoritarian successor parties, state-building, and religion and politics.

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