A century of party congress elections in China and the Soviet Union

Ruling parties are thought to sustain autocracies by facilitating elite power-sharing. If so, authoritarian party institutions must be reasonably resilient. We evaluate this thesis by studying dissenting votes against leader-nominated candidates in party congress elections—among the most pervasive yet least examined forms of elections in twentieth-century autocracies. We combine Chinese Communist Party election data (1945–2017), estimated through a new heuristic method, with Soviet Communist Party records from declassified Russian archives (1934–1986) to provide the first comparative analysis of elections in the two major communist states. We further validate the heuristic method against Soviet records, providing the first direct evidence for this increasingly adopted tool. Both regimes exhibited active dissent in their early periods, but dissent eventually declined—though far more gradually in China until a precipitous drop after 2012. These findings cast doubt on the party-sustaining-autocracy thesis and open a new frontier in authoritarian election studies.