State Capacity and Elite Strategies for Party Formation in Electoral Authoritarian Regimes

Why do politicians run for office when they know they will not gain power? Existing theories of party and party system formation do not explain why elites choose to compete under unfair conditions – why they form loyal opposition parties in electoral authoritarian regimes. I argue that party formation under dictatorship depends in part on a state’s ability to implement policy through a capable and independent bureaucracy. At lower levels of state administrative capacity, authoritarian regimes manage rent-seeking elites through clientelism, which encourages politicians to either join the ruling party or form a large number of small parties. As state capacity increases, bargaining over public goods becomes a viable option. Under those conditions, elites have an incentive to form larger and more stable political parties, leading to greater collective action within the parliamentary opposition. My dissertation establishes an overall cross-national relationship between state capacity and opposition fractionalization in electoral authoritarian regimes based on an original dataset of authoritarian election results from 1972-2015. I then test the causal nature of this relationship with interview and survey-based case studies demonstrating that policy-motivated elites are more likely to form parties in countries with more effective bureaucracies. In the Kyrgyz Republic, a state with low administrative capacity, politicians are more interested in access to patronage than implementation of policy and those who do seek to advance legislation can only do so within the ruling party. By contrast, Armenian bureaucratic reforms made the state a nexus of policy bargaining and opposition elites formed parties and coalitions to take advantage of this opportunity.