The durability of revolutionary regimes

Journal of Democracy

Volumn 24, Issue 3, 2013, Pages 5-17

  Levitsky, Steven ^a   Way, Lucan ^b  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84880394654     PISSN: 10455736     EISSN: 10863214     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jod.2013.0043     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 264.
2. Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1979),
3. We operationalize sustained violent struggle as one in which armed conflict (guerrilla struggle, large-scale postrevolutionary counterinsurgency or civil war, or external war resulting from revolutionary seizure of power) persists for at least one year. Armed conflict may precede (e.g., China) or immediately follow (e.g., Russia) the seizure of power. We treat armed struggle as ideological where it aims at the radical transformation of the existing social order, whether it seeks to achieve racial equality, large-scale land reform, socialism, radical anticlericalism, or Islamic rule.
4. We also include the regime in North Korea, which was installed by the Soviet Union after World War II, but was founded by veterans of an earlier guerrilla struggle against Japanese colonial rule and consolidated amid the Korean War.
5. Other durable authoritarian regimes include those rooted in what Dan Slater calls counterinsurgency "protection pacts, " such as Malaysia and Singapore. See Dan Slater, Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
6. Revolutionary regimes that survived include Algeria, Angola, China, Cuba, Iran, Laos, Mozambique, North Korea, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. Those that collapsed are Albania and Nicaragua. If we include postrevolutionary regimes, or cases in which the revolutionary generation had died off by 1989 (Mexico, USSR, Taiwan, Yugoslavia), the survival rate falls to 63 percent (10 of 16), which is still far greater than that of nonrevolutionary regimes. Note that we exclude South Yemen, which ceased to exist after Yemeni unification in 1990. Calculations are based on data collected by Milan Svolik (http:// publish.illinois.edu/msvolik).
7. Stephen M. Walt, Revolution and War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996).
8. See Dan Slater, "Revolutions, Crackdowns, and Quiescence: Communal Elites and Democratic Mobilization in Southeast Asia, " American Journal of Sociology 115 (July 2009): 203-54.
9. David Waldner, Democracy and Dictatorship in the Postcolonial World (forthcoming).
10. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, 327-28.
11. See, for example, Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies.
12. Barbara Geddes, "What Do We Know About Democratization After Twenty Years?" Annual Review of Political Science 2 (June 1999): 115-44
13. Benjamin Smith, "Life of the Party: The Origins of Regime Breakdown and Persistence under Single-Party Rule, " World Politics 57 (April 2005): 421-51
14. Jason Brownlee, Authoritarianism in an Age of Democratization (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007)
15. Beatriz Magaloni, "Credible Power Sharing and the Longevity of Authoritarian Rule, " Comparative Political Studies 41 (April 2008): 715-41.
16. Huntington, Political Order.
17. Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way, "Beyond Patronage: Violent Struggle, Ruling Party Cohesion and Authoritarian Durability, " Perspectives on Politics 10 (December 2012): 869-89.
18. Jocelyn Alexander, "The Local State in Post-War Mozambique: Political Practice and Ideas about Authority, " Africa 67, no. 1 (1997): 3.
19. Blessing-Miles Tendi, Making History in Mugabe's Zimbabwe: Politics, Intellectuals and the Media (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), 151
20. MacAlister Brown and Joseph Zasloff, Apprentice Revolutionaries: The Communist Movement in Laos, 1930-1985 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), 152.
21. Robert Service, The Bolshevik Party in Revolution, 1917-1923: A Study in Organizational Change (London: Macmillan Press, 1979), 95, 93, 92, 133.
22. Adrienne LeBas, From Protest to Parties: Party-Building and Democratization in Africa (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 44-47.
23. Milan Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 4-5, 10-12.
24. See Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions.
25. Jorge I. Domínguez, "The Cuban Army, " in Jonathan Adelman, ed. Communist Armies in Politics (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1981), 45-46, 54.
26. William Turley, "The Vietnamese Army, " in Adelman, Communist Armies in Politics, 66-68
27. Roderic Ai Camp, Mexico's Military on the Democratic Stage (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2005), 45
28. Dennis Gilbert, Sandinistas: The Party and the Revolution (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 52
29. Norma Krieger, "Zimbabwe Today: Hope Against Grim Realities, " Review of African Political Economy 27 (September 2000): 443-50.
30. Amos Perlmutter, The Military and Politics in Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 206, 15.
31. Roberto J. Cajina, Transición política y reconversíon militar en Nicaragua, 1990-1995 (Managua, Nicaragua: CRIES, 1997), 125.
32. Kenneth Katzman, The Warriors of Islam: Iran's Revolutionary Guard (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993), 23
33. David Shambaugh, "The Soldier and the State in China: The Political Work System in the People's Liberation Army, " China Quarterly, no. 127 (September 1991): 530
34. Turley, "Vietnamese Army, " 66-68.
35. Eric Nordlinger, Soldiers in Politics, Military Coups and Governments (London: Prentice Hall, 1977), 17.
36. Skocpol, States and Revolutions.
37. Ted R. Gurr, "War, Revolution, and the Growth of the Coercive State, " Comparative Political Studies 21 (April 1988): 45-65.
38. Gurr, "War, Revolution, and the Growth of the Coercive State, " 57.
39. Dominguez, "Cuban Army, " 47.
40. Cajini, Transición política.
41. Steven Levitsky and Lucan A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 57-59.
42. Eva Bellin, "Reconsidering the Robustness of Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Lessons from the Arab Spring, " Comparative Politics 44 (January 2012): 131-32.
43. On this transformation, see Kenneth Jowitt, New World Disorder: The Leninist Extinction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
44. Andrew C. Janos, "The One-Party State and Social Mobilization: East Europe between the Wars, " in Samuel Huntington and Clement Moore, eds., Authoritarian Politics in Modern Society: The Dynamics of Established One-Party Systems (New York: Basic Books, 1970), 231.
45. See, for example, Jennifer Gandhi, Political Institutions Under Dictatorship (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).