The incentives for pre-electoral coalitions in non-democratic elections

Bibliographic Data

ID6252988
AuthorsJill Gandhi (0000-0002-8868-4149, Emory University), Jennifer Gandhi, Ora John Reuter (0000-0002-2576-3018, University of Rochester)
Year2013
Volume20
Issue1
Pages137-159
Publication date2013-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueDemocratization (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1351-0347 • E-ISSN: 1743-890X
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13510347.2013.738865
OpenAlexW2092982601
LanguageEN
Citations received56
References cited23

What are the incentives of opposition parties to coordinate their electoral strategies to challenge authoritarian incumbents? Are these incentives the same in non-democracies as in democracies? A well-formed literature on party competition in established democracies points to the importance of mostly institutional factors in determining whether parties form pre-electoral coalitions. We find, however, that many of these institutional factors have only modest effects on the formation of opposition coalitions in authoritarian elections. As a consequence, we discuss the ways in which authoritarian elections differ from democratic ones, focusing on how these differences affect the incentives of parties to form coalitions. Analysing original data on party competition in legislative elections in all non-democracies from 1946 to 2006, we find that electoral repression and the stability of parties influence the emergence of pre-electoral coalitions among opposition parties. Keywords: authoritarianismelectionsoppositioncoalitions Notes Schedler, Electoral Authoritarianism; Magaloni, Voting for Autocracy; Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism. Schedler, Electoral Authoritarianism. Reuter and Remington, "Dominant Party Regimes". For a review, see Gandhi and Lust-Okar, "Elections under Authoritarianism". Bargsted and Kedar, "Coalition-Targeted Duvergerian Voting"; Carroll and Cox, "Gamson's Law"; Golder, Pre-Electoral Coalition Formation; Laver and Schofield, Multiparty Government. Gandhi, Political Institutions under Dictatorship; Wright, "Do Authoritarian Institutions Constrain?"; Malesky and Schuler, "Nodding or Needling". Blaydes, Elections and Distributive Politics; Lust-Okar, "Elections under Authoritarianism". Howard and Roessler, "Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes". The effective number of parties under authoritarianism is based on data from 1946 to 2006, while the figure for democracies is constructed from data from 1946 to 2000. This finding is in contrast to that found in Wahman, "Offices and Policies". For democracies during this period, the equivalent proportion is roughly 30%. Legislative elections in communist dictatorships (that is Eastern Europe, Soviet Union, Mongolia, North Korea, Vietnam after 1976, Laos from 1975, and Cuba from 1959) are excluded. Schedler, Electoral Authoritarianism; Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism. What Benoit terms "stepping back". See Benoit, "Two Step Forward". Martin and Stevenson, "Government Formation"; Debus, "Pre-Electoral Commitments". We discuss the details of our criteria for identifying coalitions in the "Empirical analysis" section. Cox, Making Votes Count; Strom, Budge, and Laver, "Constraints on Cabinet Formation". Mixed electoral systems that have larger PR components designed to "compensate" for disproportionality also encourage electoral coalitions. See Ferrara and Herron, "Going it Alone?". Complete descriptions and sources of the variable can be found in the appendix. Kalyvas, Christian Democracy in Europe; Przeworski and Sprague, Paper Stones; Meguid, Party Competition. Golder, Pre-Electoral Coalition Formation. Gschwend and Hooghe, "Voter Responses to Pre-Electoral Coalitions". Blaydes, Elections and Distributive Politics; Lust-Okar, "Elections under Authoritarianism". Duverger, Political Parties, Cox, Making Votes Count. Golder, Pre-Electoral Coalition Formation. Gschwend and Hooghe, "Voter Responses to Pre-Electoral Coalitions". Golder, Pre-Electoral Coalition Formation. We use the results from the previous, rather than the current, election to construct Party asymmetry to avoid spurious correlation generated by endogeneity. In this interactive model, it could still be possible that electoral rules and ethnic cleavages have effects at certain values of the respective modifying variable. After examining the conditional coefficients of each of these variables at different values of the modifying variable, we find no evidence that they have an effect at any value of the modifier. In countries in which multi-party elections were preceded by single party rule, the lagged dependent variable is coded as 0 (rather than missing). The results are substantively similar if the lagged dependent variable is coded as missing for the first multi-party election in all countries. Huskey and Isakova, "Evidence from Kyrgyzstan". Kynev, "Politicheskii Partii v Rossiskikh Regionakh"; Golosov, "Elektoralnyi Aftoritarianizm v Rossii". Lust-Okar, Incumbents, Opponents, and Institutions. Huskey and Isakova, "Evidence from Kyrgyzstan". Przeworski, Democracy and the Market. Gandhi, "Presidential Power in Authoritarian Elections". The contrast with established democracies is stark: empirically, the reneging on pre-electoral agreements is highly unusual (Golder, Pre-Electoral Coalition Formation). This is likely because parties are stable and interact with each other frequently. Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland, "Democracy and Dictatorship Revisited". Banks, Thomas, and William, Political Handbook of the World. In this regard, our measure differs from some indicators of pre-electoral coalitions in democracies found in Carroll and Cox, "Gamson's Law", and Golder, Pre-Electoral Coalition Formation. We identified 23 coalitions that received no seats in the previous election and 13 that received less than 5% between the parties. We also identified seven coalitions where the ratio of the largest coalition partner to the next largest was greater than 15. This rule leads us to exclude four more insignificant coalitions. Wahman, "Offices and Policies". Ibid. Van de Walle, "Tipping Games?". Howard and Roessler, "Liberalizing Electoral Outcomes". Gandhi and Reuter, "Opposition Coordination". Reuter and Gandhi, "Economic Performance". This variable, and variants of it, have been used elsewhere to measure ruling party strength. See Reuter and Gandhi, "Economic Performance"; Gehlbach and Keefer, "Private Investment". Almost 25% of authoritarian elections feature no dominant ruling party. Diamond, "Thinking about Hybrid Regimes", 23. Moser, "Electoral Systems

Authoritarianism · Competition (biology · Democracy · Economic system · Economics · Incentive · Legislature · Market economy · Opposition (politics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Electoral Systems and Political Participation · Law · Political Conflict and Governance · Social Policy and Reform Studies

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