https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3684-9914
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ABSTRACT
Scholarship on democratization has made significant progress in theorizing the trajectories of former authoritarian elites, with considerable attention given to authoritarian successor parties in particular. However, the literature has largely failed to contend with cases in which the cohort of former authoritarian officials scatters widely across the political system. We identify these patterns of dispersion as authoritarian diasporas and investigate their potential causes and consequences. In launching a new research agenda on this understudied phenomenon, we review not only contending causes for elite defection from authoritarian ruling parties, but also various options for political reincarnation of these officials (e.g. new party creation, colonization of existing parties, and independent candidacies). We hypothesize that the initial decision to defect is contingent upon a number of intervening regime- and individual-level variables. The destinations of former authoritarian incumbents are shaped by regime legacies, personal political resources, and institutional rules. We conclude by reflecting on the ways in which authoritarian diasporas are likely to be more harmful to democracy than the continued presence of an authoritarian successor party.
Acknowledgements
This article grew out of a paper first presented at the workshop “Authoritarian Diasporas: Causes and Consequences of Authoritarian Elite Dispersion in New Democracies,” held at the University of Oxford on 25 October 2019. We thank the John Fell OUP Research Fund (grant number 0006230) for generously funding the workshop and St. Hugh’s College for hosting it. We also thank Ben Ansell, David Doyle, and other workshop participants, as well as two anonymous reviewers, for their extremely useful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Huntington, The Third Wave.
2 Stepan, Rethinking; Valenzuela, “Democratic Consolidation”; and Garretón, Incomplete Democracy. The term “authoritarian enclave” has also been used in a spatial sense to refer to territorial pockets of non-democratic rule left behind after a national-level transition to democracy (e.g. Gibson, Boundary Control).
3 Karl, “Dilemmas,” 8.
4 Albertus and Menaldo, Authoritarianism, 8.
5 Loxton, “Authoritarian Successor Parties.”
6 See, for example, Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming the Communist Past, and Ishiyama, Communist Successor Parties.
7 On Africa, see Riedl, Authoritarian Origins, and LeBas, “Survival.” On Asia, see Hicken and Kuhonta, “Introduction,” and Slater and Wong, “Strength to Concede.” On Latin America, see Langston, Democratization, and Power, “Contrasting Trajectories.”
8 Loxton, “Introduction.”
9 Power, The Political Right.
10 Hagopian, Traditional Politics.
11 Mainwaring, “Transition.”
12 Power, “Contrasting Trajectories.”
13 Power, The Political Right, 76–81.
14 See Hagopian, “Democracy,” and Stepan, Rethinking.
15 On the exile of former dictators to foreign countries, see Escribà-Folch and Krcmaric, “Dictators.” While this is an important topic deserving of further study, it is not the focus of our concept.
16 While our focus in this article is on the arena of electoral politics, we acknowledge that this is not the only arena in which the continuity of authoritarian personnel shapes the trajectories of new democracies. In fact, the contributions to this thematic section by Lucan Way (on the political influence of economic elites after state socialism) and by Michael Albertus and Mark Deming (on unelected policymakers, including judges and bureaucrats) make this point explicitly. Nevertheless, elections are a definitional element of democracy and thus we take them as a natural starting point, leaving other types of diasporic behaviour to our collaborators. The electoral incarnations of former authoritarian elites nearly always figure heavily in their strategies for retaining influence under democracy, and early electoral outcomes often have a major impact on the direction of the new regime.
17 It is more difficult to trace authoritarian dispersion in cases where the dictatorship did not create an official ruling party (e.g. Chile, Argentina).
18 Cheng and Hsu, “Long in the Making,” 111–12.
19 Zimmer and Haran, “Unfriendly,” 557.
20 See Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.
21 Pop-Eleches, “Party for All Seasons.”
22 Loxton, “Authoritarian Successor Parties”; Loxton, “Introduction.”
23 Wolf, “Former RCD officials,” 553–54.
24 Schulz-Herzenberg, “New National Party,” 166.
25 Dahl, Polyarchy, 15.
26 Here we offer a heavily stylized analysis of a primary game of authoritarian elite defection, referring to defectors in the aggregate and drawing insights largely from cases where democratization has already occurred. We do not undertake analysis of the secondary game of potential coordination among the subset of potential defectors, although we recognize that the shifting benefits of defection—and perhaps even the likelihood of transition itself—are endogenous to such interactions. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer for drawing our attention to this point.
27 For an overview, see Levitsky and Way, “Beyond Patronage.”
28 Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming the Communist Past, 5.
29 Loxton, “Authoritarian Successor Parties”; Loxton, “Introduction.”
30 Power, The Political Right, 114, 117.
31 Loxton, “Authoritarian Successor Parties”; Loxton, “Introduction.”
32 For Dahl, these factors included the level of socioeconomic modernization, the degree of concentration in the economy, and whether arms were widely distributed among the population. See Dahl, Polyarchy.
33 Schedler, “Elections Without Democracy,” 47.
34 See Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism.
35 Loxton, “Introduction,” 14–18.
36 For an overview, see Munck and Leff, “Modes of Transition.”
37 Haggard and Kaufman, Political Economy, 126–35.
38 Slater and Wong, “Strength to Concede.”
39 On the role of uncertainty and rapid unfolding of events, see Przeworski, “Some Problems.”
40 Bruhn, Taking on Goliath, 42–44.
41 Share, “Franquist Regime.”
42 For more on the “artificiality” of ARENA/PDS in Brazil, see Power, The Political Right, 70.
43 Chege, “Kenya,” 132–35.
44 Sartori, Parties, 74–78.
45 For one of the definitive works on this topic, see Gandhi, Political Institutions.
46 Here we do not enter into debates about the origins of these rules or the degree to which they are endogenous to the strength of the authoritarian ruling party (e.g. Riedl, Authoritarian Origins). For overviews of the “endogenous institutions” debate in new democracies, see Shvetsova, “Endogenous,” and Hassan, “Institutional.”
47 Power, The Political Right.
48 See Loxton, “Introduction.”
49 See Fearon, “Counterfactuals.”
50 Riedl et al., “Authoritarian-Led Democratization.”
51 Weber, “Parties and Parliament.”
52 Power, The Political Right.
53 Kitschelt and Singer, “Linkage Strategies.”
54 On party system institutionalization, see Mainwaring and Scully, “Introduction.” On the regime cleavage and party system institutionalization in a variety of geographic settings, see Grzymala-Busse, Rebuilding Leviathan; Hicken and Kuhonta, “Introduction”; and Riedl, Authoritarian Origins.
55 On party brands and brand dilution, see Lupu, “Brand Dilution.”
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Notes on contributors
James Loxton
James Loxton is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Politics at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Conservative Party-Building in Latin America: Authoritarian Inheritance and Counterrevolutionary Struggle (Oxford University Press, 2021) and the co-editor of Life after Dictatorship: Authoritarian Successor Parties Worldwide (Cambridge University Press, 2018). He holds a PhD in Government from Harvard University.
Timothy Power
Timothy J. Power is Professor of Latin American Politics at the University of Oxford and Head of the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies (OSGA). Among his books are The Political Right in Postauthoritarian Brazil: Elites, Institutions, and Democratization (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000) and (with Nic Cheeseman and Paul Chaisty) Coalitional Presidentialism in Comparative Perspective: Minority Presidents in Multiparty Systems (Oxford University Press, 2018).