Why Parties of Power? Elite Strategies and Institutional Choice in Post-Soviet Eurasia.

Parties of Power;Institutional Choice;Competitive Authoritarianism;South Caucasus;Central Asia;Political Science;Russian and East European Studies;Social Sciences;Political Science

Feiman, Eli AdamHicken, Allen ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Parties of Power;    Institutional Choice;    Competitive Authoritarianism;    South Caucasus;    Central Asia;    Political Science;    Russian and East European Studies;    Social Sciences;    Political Science;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/116707/efeiman_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

In this project, I pose the question, ;;why do authoritarian rulers create political parties?;; Given the recent proliferation of authoritarian regimes that feature pluralistic, if skewed, elections, the incentives for dictators to have parties of their own have never been stronger. Yet only about half of authoritarian rulers in fact have their own parties. I argue that incumbent rulers create parties of power in order to change existing political elites;; incentives for cooperation, but that many rulers do not to create parties of their own because they risk failing to attract political elites into their party. I theorize party creation by incumbent authoritarian rulers as a strategic and interdependent process, in which the act of establishing a party serves as a meaningful but imperfect signal of a leader’s type. I present a formal model of authoritarian party creation in which I define parameters and state assumptions that generate five pure-strategy equilibria. I state two hypotheses relating to the role of elite beliefs in leading to different party creation outcomes, which I evaluate using paired historical case studies of four Post-Soviet leaders’ institutional choices. This project offers a corrective to existing theories of authoritarian party creation by focusing on short-term incentives and immediate strategic conditions. It also demonstrates why many leaders choose not to create parties despite having incentives to do so.