Ruling Party Institutionalization and Autocratic Success

We argue that a key difference among non-democracies is the extent to which autocratic leaders create institutionalized ruling parties as a way of making credible commitments to investors. We show that to be effective in this role, institutionalized ruling parties must satisfy two constraints. The expropriation constraint requires that the autocrat prefer to only partially expropriate party members and avoid collective action, rather than to expropriate all party members; this implies that parties must be small enough for full expropriation to be unattractive. The investment constraint requires that party members prefer to invest; this implies that parties be large enough that expropriation is an unlikely event for any party member. The conditions for these constraints to hold, and for the autocrat to prefer creating an institutionalized ruling party, help to explain variation in political institutions and economic performance in non-democracies