Economic performance and elite defection from hegemonic parties

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 41, Issue 1, 2011, Pages 83-110

  Reuter, Ora John ^a   Gandhi, Jennifer ^a  

^a EMORY UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79957496162     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123410000293     Document Type: Article

References (134)

1. Michael Bratton and Nicolas Van de Walle, 'Neopatrimonial Regimes and Political Transitions in Africa', World Politics, 46(1995), 453-89;
2. Barbara Geddes, 'Authoritarian Breakdown: Empirical Test of a Game Theoretic Argument' (prepared for the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, 1999);
3. Jennifer Gandhi and Adam Przeworski, 'Cooperation, Cooptation, and Rebellion under Dictatorships', Economics and Politics, 18(2006), 1-26;
4. Beatriz Magaloni, 'Credible Power-Sharing and the Longevity of Authoritarian Rule', Comparative Political Studies, 41(2008), 715-41;
5. Joseph Wright, 'Do Authoritarian Institutions Constrain? How Legislatures Affect Economic Growth and Investment', American Journal of Political Science, 52(2008), 322-43.
6. Samuel Huntington, 'Social and Institutional Dynamics of One-Party Systems', in Samuel Huntington and Clement Moore, eds, Authoritarian Politics in Modern Society: The Dynamics of Established One-Party Systems (New York: Basic Books, 1970);
7. Beatriz Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy: Hegemonic Party Survival and its Demise in Mexico (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006);
8. Jason Brownlee, Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
9. Geddes, 'Authoritarian Breakdown';
10. Dan Slater, 'Iron Cage in an Iron Fist: Authoritarian Institutions and the Personalization of Power in Malaysia', Comparative Politics, 36(2003), 81-101;
11. Benjamin Smith, 'Life of the Party: The Origins of Regime Breakdown and Persistence under Single Party Ruler', World Politics, 57(2005), 421-51;
12. Brownlee, Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization.
13. See Mark Gasiorowski, 'Economic Crisis and Political Regime Change: An Event History Analysis', American Political Science Review, 89(1995), 882-97; (Pubitemid 126007925)
14. Geddes, 'Authoritarian Breakdown'.
15. Guillermo O'Donnell and Philippe Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986);
16. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
17. Stephan Haggard and Robert Kaufman, The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1995).
18. Geddes, 'Authoritarian Breakdown';
19. Smith, 'Life of the Party'.
20. Todd Eisenstadt, Courting Democracy in Mexico: Party Strategies and Electoral Institutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004);
21. Kenneth Greene, Why Dominant Parties Lose: Mexico's Democratization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
22. Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy;
23. Magaloni, 'Credible Power-Sharing and the Longevity of Authoritarian Rule'.
24. See O'Donnell and Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule;
25. Przeworski, Democracy and the Market.
26. Michael Bratton and Nicolas Van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
27. Valerie Bunce, 'Rethinking Recent Democratization: Lessons from the Post-Communist Experience', World Politics, 55(2003), 167-92. (Pubitemid 36599952)
28. Haggard and Kaufmann, The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions;
29. Elizabeth Jean Wood, Forging Democracy from Below: Insurgent Transitions in South Africa and El Salvador (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
30. Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy; Brownlee, Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization;
31. Magaloni, 'Credible Power-Sharing and the Longevity of Authoritarian Rule'.
32. Judith Teichman, Policy Making in Mexico: From Boom to Crisis (Boston, Mass.: Allen and Unwin, 1988).
33. Joy Langston, 'Breaking Out is Hard to Do: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty in Mexico's One-Party Hegemonic Regime', Latin American Politics and Society, 44(2002), 61-81, p76).
34. Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy.
35. Langston attributes elite ruptures in the PRI as well as the KMT in Taiwan to increased electoral competition and succession crises; Joy Langston, 'Elite Ruptures: When Do Ruling Parties Split?' in Andreas Schedler, ed., Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition (Boulder, Col.: Lynne Rienner, 2006), pp. 57-76. Analysing the same cases, Haggard and Kaufman find no relationship between crisis and elite defection in dominant party autocracies while finding substantial case-study evidence for the linkage in Latin American military regimes
36. (Haggard and Kaufman, The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions).
37. See Gasiorowski, 'Economic Crisis and Political Regime Change';
38. and Carles Boix and Susan Stokes, 'Endogenous Democratization', World Politics, 55(2003), 517-49. (Pubitemid 38122875)
39. However, we did conduct a separate analysis which shows that defections have a positive effect on the probability of a hegemonic regime losing power.
40. Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, 'The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism', Journal of Democracy, 13(2002), 51-65;
41. Schedler, ed., Electoral Authoritarianism.
42. Brownlee, Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization.
43. We use the terms 'hegemonic party' and 'dominant party' interchangeably throughout the text.
44. Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems: A Framework for Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976);
45. Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy;
46. Kenneth Greene, 'The Political Economy of Authoritarian Single Party Dominance', Comparative Political Studies, 43(2010), 1-27;
47. Ora John Reuter and Thomas Remington, 'Dominant Party Regimes and the Commitment Problem: The Case of United Russia', Comparative Political Studies, 42(2009), 501-26.
48. While we have theoretical foundations for the 50 per cent cut point, we also examine whether the choice of threshold affects our results by including an interaction term between economic growth and the seat share of the dominant party in the statistical analysis. In this way, rather than impose an ex ante criterion, we allow the data to 'speak' as to whether the choice of threshold affects the results. The results, to be discussed, show that the size of the hegemonic party's legislative majority does not condition the effect of growth on defections.
49. Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy;
50. Greene, 'The Political Economy of Authoritarian Single Party Dominance'.
51. As with the choice of seat share threshold, we examine whether durability affects the results and is thereby justified as a criterion, by including an interaction term between duration and growth in the statistical analysis. As we show, the age of the hegemonic party does not appreciably affect the substantive results.
52. Reuter and Remington, 'Dominant Party Regimes and the Commitment Problem'.
53. Kimuli Kasara, 'A Prize Too Large to Share: Opposition Coalitions and the Kenyan Presidency, 1991-2002' (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, 2005).
54. Hari Singh, 'Political Change in Malaysia: The Role of Semangat 46', Asian Survey, 31(1991), 712-28.
55. Lisa Blaydes, 'Electoral Budget Cycles under Authoritarianism: Economic Opportunism in Mubarak's Egypt' (prepared for the Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, 2006).
56. While the literature on economic voting includes a large debate on this point, there is some evidence that voters evaluate incumbents based on economic performance. See, for example, Michael Lewis-Beck, Economics and Elections: The Major Western Democracies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988);
57. Karen Remmer, 'The Political Impact of Economic Crisis in Latin America in the 1980s', American Political Science Review, 85(1991), 777-800;
58. G. Bingham Powell Jr and Guy Whitten, 'A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context', American Journal of Political Science, 37(1993), 391-414;
59. Alexander Pacek and Benjamin Radcliff, 'The Political Economy of Competitive Elections in the Developing World', American Journal of Political Science, 39(1995), 745-59;
60. Raymond Duch and Randy Stevenson, 'Assessing the Magnitude of the Economic Vote over Time and Across Nations', Electoral Studies, 25(2005), 528-47.
61. David Apter, The Politics of Modernization (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1965), p. 186.
62. Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy.
63. Greene, 'The Political Economy of Authoritarian Single Party Dominance'.
64. Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy.
65. Pranab Bardhan, 'Corruption and Development: A Review of Issues', Journal of Economic Literature, 35(1997), 1320-46; (Pubitemid 127491567)
66. Paolo Mauro, 'Corruption and Growth', Quarterly Journal of Economics, 110(1995), 681-712.
67. Singh, 'Political Change in Malaysia', p. 714;
68. Brownlee, Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization.
69. Alberto Alesina, Sule Özler, Nouriel Roubini and Phillip Swagel, 'Political Instability and Economic Growth', Journal of Economic Growth, 1(1996), 189-211. (Pubitemid 126434925)
70. Adam Przeworski, Michael Alvarez, José Antonio Cheibub and Fernando Limongi, Democracy and Development: Political Institutions and Well-being in the World, 1950-1990 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
71. Since we cannot gather information on all legislative candidates in parliamentary regimes, we look only at the founders and leaders of parties in parliamentary regimes. If the founders and/or leaders of an opposition party were members of the hegemonic party prior to the election, this counts as a defection.
72. For information on the sources used for all variables in the analysis, see the author's webpage: http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~oreuter/Reuter-Site/ Home.html
73. We recognize that this coding rule may exclude instances in which a potential defector challenges the regime with the precise goal of being expelled. But we choose not to code these cases as defection, for admitting such cases would also oblige us to include regime-initiated purges in which notable party members are simply expelled against their own will.
74. We also test the effect of long-run economic growth (i.e. the average growth rate over the life of the hegemonic party) and one-year lag of economic growth. As we discuss below, the results are highly similar.
75. Monty G. Marshall and Keith Jaggers, Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800-2002. Version p4v2002e [Computer File]. College Park: Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland, 2002 URL: http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/polity/index. htm.
76. If there is no prior presidential election, we take the regime party's vote total in the prior legislative election. In the first elections after single-party rule, Previous Vote receives a value of 100. In the first elections after independence, we take the hegemonic party's vote share in elections for territorial or colonial assemblies.
77. Marc Morje Howard and Philip G. Roessler, 'Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes', American Journal of Political Science, 50(2006), 365-81. (Pubitemid 43475146)
78. Gary Cox, Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997);
79. Simon Hug, Altering Party Systems: Strategic Behavior and the Emergence of New Political Parties in Western Democracies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). We cannot measure the spatial location of candidates and parties in authoritarian elections. But arguably, policy differences among opposition parties in dictatorships hardly play a role in electoral campaigns, since realistically these parties have little chance to implement their platforms
80. (Howard and Roessler, 'Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes in Competitive Authoritarian Regimes', p. 371).
81. Recent studies using cross-national electoral data with low country (N) to time-period (T) ratios such as ours (3.8 elections per hegemonic party) have settled on this approach (see Matthew Golder, 'Presidential Coattails and Legislative Fragmentation', American Journal of Political Science, 50(2006), 34-48; (Pubitemid 43395949)
82. and Allen Hicken, Building Party Systems in Developing Democracies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). Including a lagged dependent variable to correct for serial autocorrelation within units is impractical given the large number of observations that would be lost and the uneven spacing between elections. Even so, models that include Past Defections (a measure of whether a hegemonic party has experienced a defection at some time in the past) as a control variable reveal little indication of temporal dependence.
83. However, reverse causation is possible in that a defection may affect the vote share of an incumbent in the contemporaneous election. Also, this variable is highly correlated with both Polity and Previous Vote. Indeed, when removing Vote Share from Model 2, Previous Vote becomes significant. Therefore, in most of the subsequent models we use Previous Vote in place of Vote Share to circumvent the endogeneity problems posed by Vote Share.
84. The importance of opportunity structure in determining the likelihood of defection raises the issue of endogenous elections. If dictators anticipate elite defections from their coalitions in upcoming elections, they can cancel elections, opening the possibility for selection effects that may bias our results. Upon investigating cancelled elections, we found that dictators in party regimes cancel elections very infrequently. In Africa, for example, scheduled elections were cancelled only four times (i.e. Angola 1997 and 2002, Burkina Faso in 1974, and Guinea-Bissau in 1992). Given the rarity of cancelled elections, we choose not to use a selection model because the skewness of the dependent variable in the first stage (cancelled elections) will produce highly inefficient and possibly biased estimates of covariates that affect the decision to hold elections and of the Inverse Mill's Ratio. In addition, since the severity of selection bias is directly proportional to the percentage of the sample that is truncated, we are sanguine about the robustness of our results in the face of potential selection bias.
85. The model shown includes only Sub-Saharan Africa as a control variable. In other results, we tested other regional dummies and found them to be collectively insignificant.
86. Barbara Geddes, 'What Do We Know about Democratization after Twenty Years?' Annual Review of Political Science, 2(1999), 115-44.
87. We are grateful to Joseph Wright for providing his update of Geddes's regime classification from Wright, 'Do Authoritarian Institutions Constrain?'
88. We also attempted to proxy the propensity of the regime to use repression with a variable that measures the number of 'purges' in a given year, where purges are defined as any systematic jailing or execution of political opposition by the regime. See Arthur Banks, Cross-National Time Series Data Archive (2005). This variable was not significant.
89. See, for example, Powell and Whitten, 'A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting';
90. Christopher Anderson, 'The End of Economic Voting? Contingency Dilemmas and the Limits of Democratic Accountability', Annual Review of Political Science, 10(2007), 271-96;
91. Raymond M. Duch and Randolph Stevenson, Economic Vote: How Political and Economic Institutions Condition Election Results (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
92. Timothy Hellwig and David Samuels, 'Electoral Accountability and the Variety of Democratic Regimes', British Journal of Political Science, 38(2008), 65-90.
93. Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy; Brownlee, Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization.
94. Haggard and Kaufman, The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions;
95. Valerie Bunce, Subversive Institutions: The Design and Destruction of Socialism and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
96. We also examined this alternative hypothesis by including per capita income. The coefficient on income is never significantly different from 0 while the effects of other variables remain substantively unchanged.
97. John Gerring, Case Study Research: Principles and Practices (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
98. Historical accounts suggest that the elections were marred by irregularities. Moreover, the elections were called early so as to exploit the opposition's inability to organize. Although the official results were never made public, the CHP retained a commanding parliamentary majority. See Firouz Bahrampour, Turkey: Political and Social Transformation (Brooklyn, N. Y.: Theo. Gaus' Sons, 1967), p. 20;
99. Kemal Karpat, Turkey's Politics (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1959).
100. Karpat, Turkey's Politics, p48.
101. Cem Erogul, 'The Establishment of Multi-party Rule: 1945-1971', in Irvin C. Schick and Ertugrul Ahmet Tonak, eds, Turkey in Transition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 108.
102. That this act was not a 'morally justified' component of a lustration programme against the RPP is confirmed by the fact that the DP waited until mid 1951 to take these measures and that the resolution was not implemented at first, but only held out as a threat to keep the CHP in check. Only when the DP recognized the CHP as an endemic threat did it move to confiscate the party's assets (Erogul, 'The Establishment of Multi-party Rule', p. 108).
103. Walter F. Weiker, The Turkish Revolution: 1960-1961 (Washington, D. C.: The Brookings Institution, 1963), p. 10.
104. As Weiker, The Turkish Revolution, points out, where the laws were not inherently anti-democratic, their selective interpretation and enforcement were.
105. Erogul, 'The Establishment of Multi-party Rule', p. 111.
106. The party won 93 per cent of the seats in the legislative assembly.
107. Kemal Karpat, 'The Turkish Elections of 1957', Western Political Quarterly, 14(1961), 436-59.
108. Richard Robinson, The First Turkish Republic: A Case Study in National Development (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 150.
109. For more on the origins of Turkey's economic difficulties in 1954-55, see The Economist, 2 July 1955 and 24 December 1955.
110. See Karpat, Turkey's Politics;
111. Karpat, 'The Turkish Elections of 1957';
112. and Robinson, The First Turkish Republic, on the conditions leading up to the crisis.
113. Feroz Ahmad, The Making of Modern Turkey (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 113.
114. Karpat, Turkey's Politics, p. 424.
115. Karpat, Turkey's Politics, pp. 424-6.
116. The party faced difficulties building a national organization and fared poorly in the general elections of October 1957, winning 3.7 per cent of the vote and four seats. Months later the party merged with CHP.
117. Some sources suggest that the DP was adopting more and more authoritarian practices in 1954 and 1955; see Karpat, 'The Turkish Elections of 1957'
118. and Weiker, The Turkish Revolution. We readily acknowledge the difficulty in determining whether the Freedom party defections occurred because dissatisfaction with the DP's growing authoritarianism reached some tipping point in 1955 or whether it was due solely to the economic crisis. We can only re-emphasize that the timing of Celikhbas's decision to introduce the draft amendment, and the subsequent split from the party came just weeks after the September Istanbul riots, which occurred in response to the economic crisis.
119. ZANU was Mugabe's original party, incorporating the Patriotic Front shortly before independence. This alliance briefly broke down during the 1980 elections when the PF's original leader, Joshua Nkomo, contested the elections as PF-ZAPU while Mugabe campaigned under the partisan label of ZANU-PF.
120. Norma Kriger, 'ZANU (PF) Strategies in General Elections, 1980-2000: Discourse and Coercion', African Affairs, 104(2005), 1-34; (Pubitemid 40345555)
121. Lloyd Sachikonye, 'The 1990 Zimbabwe Elections: A Post-Mortem', Review of African Political Economy, 48(1990), 92-9.
122. Craig Richardson, 'How Much Did Droughts Matter? Linking Rainfall and GDP Growth in Zimbabwe', African Affairs, 106(2007), 463-78. (Pubitemid 47249382)
123. Michael Bratton and Eldred Masunungure, 'Popular Reactions to State Repression: Operation Murambatsvina in Zimbabwe', African Affairs, 106(2006), 21-45.
124. 'Industries: Zimbabwe', Africa Research Bulletin: Economic, Financial and Technical Series, 44 (July 2007).
125. 'Power: Zimbabwe', Africa Research Bulletin: Economic, Financial and Technical Series, 44 (March 2007);
126. Brian Latham, 'Zimbabwe Currency Plunges to Four Million to the U. S. Dollar', International Herald Tribune, 5 December 2007, http://www.iht.com/ articles/2007/12/04/bloomberg/bxzim.php, downloaded 10 February 2008.
127. Joseph Winter, 'Simba Makoni: Zimbabwe's Roaring Lion?' BBC News, 5 February 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/7228205.stm, downloaded 10 February 2008.
128. Winter, 'Simba Makoni'.
129. Darren Taylor, 'Former ZANU-PF Heavyweight Prepares to Challenge Mugabe', Voice of America, 19 March 2008, http://www.voanews.com/english/Africa/Former- ZANU-PF-Heavyweight-Prepares-to-Challenge-Mugabe.cfm, downloaded 20 March 2008.
130. Patricia Mpofu, 'MDC Welcomes New Mugabe Challenger', ZimOnline, 6 February 2008, http://www.zimonline.co.za/Article.aspx?ArticleId52671, downloaded 10 February 2008. Makoni reputedly had the support of former army chief and major party figure Solomon Mujuru, whose wife was vicepresident along with other members of ZANU-PF
131. (Winter, 'Simba Makoni').
132. Simplicious Chirinda, 'Surprise, Disbelief Greets Makoni's Bid for Presidency', ZimOnline, 6 February 2008, http://www.zimonline.co.za/Article. aspx?ArticleId=2667, downloaded 10 February 2008.
133. Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy.
134. Smith, 'Life of the Party'.