___A Cross-National Analysis

Many competitive parties have witnessed the overthrow of competitive regimes, but the activities of political parties under noncompetitive regimes have received very little scholarly attention. Several authors sug-gest that parties, constrained in their conventional activities, Will take part in protest or political violence (referred to here as contentious polit-ical action). I first examine the activities of 51 political parties in 24 non-competitive regimes and establish that a majority of these parties (over 62 percent) did take part in contentious political action. Second, I attempt to explain the great variance in the incidence of party-led dissent using the theoretical framework of the political process-opportunities approach. A multivariate analysis suggests that parties will take part in greater levels of contention when the country's government has been crit-icized for human rights abuses, when repression of party organizations is low, and when repression of party leaders is at an intermediate level. Political parties in many developing democracies have faced the imposition of noncompetitive regimes. An important but neglected question concerns what parties do in this situation. Several scholars suggest that political parties, facing limits on their ability to compete for power through elections and legislatures, will respond with unconventional, contentious tactics (Dahl 1973; Blondel 1997; Aminzade 1995). In this article, I first examine whether or not parties facing non-competitive regimes actively resist. I find that many parties do resist and that there is considerable variance in the incidence (frequency and duration) of con-tentious acts in which parties took part. Some parties organized massive, sus-tained campaigns of resistance against the noncompetitive regime, while others took part in protests quite infrequently, and several parties never openly resisted the noncompetitive regime at all