| Description: |
O’Dwyer, Dan Slater, and David Waldner for thoughtful comments on previous drafts. Thanks also to Barbara Geddes and Jason Brownlee for sharing their data with me.1 Close examination of cross-national data on single-party rule and breakdown reveals no clear pattern of longevity, leaving open the question of whether single parties have a systematic strengthening effect. In this essay, I argue that the robustness of single-party regimes depends on the initial conditions surrounding their establishment. I develop a theory of single-party regime consolidation to explain the dramatic variation in longevity among these regimes. The strength of the opposition and rent scarcity during consolidation, I argue, structure the choices available to rulers early in the regime consolidation process. A weak opposition and ready access to rents makes a low-cost consolidation possible, but also provides little incentive to build a robust coalition or strong party organization; this trajectory generates weak single-party rule that is likely to collapse under crisis. Conversely, rulers who face a powerful opposition and scarce rents have no choice but to offer potential allies access to policy making and have powerful incentives to build a strong party organization. Regimes such as these, even though their consolidation is more difficult, prove more resilient during later crises. I conduct an initial test of the argument against paired comparisons of Guinea-Bissau and Tanzania and of Indonesia and the Philippines. |