The Political Economy of Authoritarian Single-Party Dominance

Why do authoritarian dominant parties, once established, continue to win elections or lose power? Employing a time-series cross-sectional analysis and two country case studies, I show that dominant parties endure despite poor economic performance, voter demand for new parties, and sufficiently permissive electoral institutions. Instead, I demonstrate that dominant parties continue to win when they can politicize public resources and they fail when privatizations put the state’s fiscal power out of their reach. The argument has implications for the fate of dominant parties, transitions to democracy in competitive authoritarian regimes, and the study of incumbency advantages and electoral fairness in comparative politics. 1 Competitive authoritarian regimes with dominant parties are puzzling because incumbents win reelection in meaningfully competitive multi-party contests for exceptionally long periods of time. They do so without clamping down so much that they become fully closed authoritarian regimes and without permitting a level partisan playing field that would transform them into competitive democracies. During the 20th century, authoritarian dominant part