@article{Authoritarian:2649,
      recid = {2649},
      author = {Deming, Jonathan Mark},
      title = {The Strategic Foundations of Authoritarian Successor  Parties},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2020-08},
      pages = {280},
      abstract = {Why do political parties from former dictatorships crop up  in many new democracies? What do the trajectories of these  authoritarian successor parties (ASPs) under democracy look  like? Why do some become permanent electoral actors under  democracy while others obsolesce or collapse outright?

  This dissertation roots ASPs’ fates in the collective  action of former authoritarian elite actors. Professional  politicians, military officers, and economic elites from  former dictatorships often retain access to critical  resources under democracy that, when channeled toward an  ASP, promote its capacity to weather the sudden and  dramatic ups and downs that often characterize electoral  competition in new democracies. But collective action by  these elites is never assured, since individual elites  often possess strong incentives during democratic  transition to abandon their elite allies and instead pursue  narrowly self-interested strategies of self-preservation.   

The question then becomes: When will a broad set of  authoritarian-era elites act collectively to sustain an ASP  under democracy? I argue that when making decisions over  collective action and defection, authoritarian-era elites  scrutinize the severity of threats to their core interests  under democracy as well as the reliability of their fellow  elites. In terms of the former, elites are more likely to  coalesce within an ASP when threats in the form of  transitional justice, erosions of de jure protections, and  widespread demand for economic redistribution generate a  perceived need for organized political protection under  democracy. In terms of the latter, elite coalescence  becomes more likely when a nascent ASP quickly signals its  reliability as a political ally to authoritarian-era elites  by staunchly defending the policies, projects, and  historical justifications of the former dictatorship.

I  assess my argument using mixed methods. First, I leverage  an original dataset on all Latin American ASPs from 1900 to  2015 to assess a key implication of my argument: In  particular, if ASPs’ survival and success are largely  rooted in their staunch defense of narrow elite interests  under democracy, then the overall quality of democracy  should suffer whenever ASPs crop up and exert their  influence. Using regression analysis, I find systematic  evidence of such a linkage: ASPs’ influence and access to  governmental power under democracy is negatively linked to  a host of high- and mid-level indicators that tap  democratic quality. Critically, this linkage is robust to a  range of controls as well as prominent alternative  explanations, including ASPs’ antecedent organizational  capacity, the persistence of authoritarian-era institutions  under democracy, authoritarian regime type-specific  legacies, and opposition party weakness.

I further assess  my argument using detailed analyses of ASPs in contemporary  Chile and Peru. My analyses draw on original archival data  as well as data from roughly 100 in-depth interviews with  former authoritarian elites and contemporary ASP leaders.  In Chile, I examine puzzling divergence in the  post-transition trajectories of the Independent Democratic  Union (UDI) and National Renewal (RN), both of which  emerged from the military dictatorship headed by General  Augusto Pinochet. In Peru, I examine the surprising revival  and consolidation of Fujimorismo, an ASP that emerged from  the personalist dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori. In both  countries, I show how ASPs’ survival and eventual success  derived from the support of broad sets of authoritarian-era  elite actors. However, I additionally show how such support  was neither immediate nor automatic. Rather, elites only  belatedly flocked to ASPs under democracy in response to  successive and growing threats to their core interests, and  they did so only after ASPs’ early behavior under democracy  had persuaded them of ASPs’ reliability as political  allies.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/2649},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.2649},
}