Institutional Dominance Configuration: Organizational Resilience and Patronage Networks in the Cases of LDP and PRI

How can a dominant party remain in power for so many years? This article defines one of the possible answers as a conceptual category. This conceptualization can be expressed as the Institutional Dominance Configuration (IDC). The definition is tested using two long-standing case studies. The first is Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP; dominance period 1955–2009, briefly interrupted in 1993–1994). The second is Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI, 1929–2000). The study is grounded in the approaches of Sartori (1976) and Ziegfeld (2022). On this basis, the IDC is distinguished from the Populist Dominance Configuration (PDC) and the Hybrid Dominance Configuration (HDC). The study’s methodology combines comparative historical analysis with within-case process tracing. In both cases, three mechanisms recur. These are the mobilization of state resources, electoral engineering, and the fragmentation of the opposition. The key issue is not so much the existence of these mechanisms as how they operate within the IDC. Three hypotheses are tested in this context. H1: electoral engineering takes the form of gradual changes based on intra-party consensus. H2: the fragmentation of the opposition is a consequence of structural incentives. H3: shifts between configurations develop in response to institutional shocks. Two events form the cornerstones of this test: the PRI’s defeat in 2000 and the independence of the Federal Electoral Institute (Instituto Federal Electoral, IFE) in 1996. When read in conjunction with the PDC/HDC framework, the article offers a configuration-sensitive and mechanism-based comparative approach to research on dominant parties.