Party institutionalization provides the basis for party survival following an electoral opening, but does not entirely explain the success of a party in retaining, regaining, and sharing power over the state in the future. Party success refers to the ability of a party to directly impact the governing process by either winning control of national political bodies or offices outright or by participating as a partner in a coalition that controls these same bodies and offices. The ability of a party to adapt its capabilities to a competitive environment is the critical component to success in the competition for power. Following Panebianco (1988), parties have two general options in politics, either to dominate politics or adapt to unoccupied political space. Dominating politics can take two pathways. First, a party may successfully use its strengths to gain a dominant share of voter support in free and fair elections. The second option is to utilize their assets and experience from the non-competitive era in order to manipulate the outcome of competitive elections in a manner consistent with Schedler’s (2002) concept of electoral authoritarianism and Levitsky and Way’s (2002) competitive authoritarianism. Even in this latter case, parties still rely on popularity and competitiveness to win elections and only are required to use manipulation as insurance against uncertainty. A party may also find success by adapting to unoccupied political space by reforming a party’s identity and using their political assets and experience to become more competitive. In this route, adaptation does not require domination of politics but instead for the party to be competitive enough to rotate in and out of office over time.
Party adaptation can be seen as a spectrum of change in the party’s identity. Adapting this identity to a new political environment may require more or less change depending on the state of the party prior to the opening. In some instances a party may only require only minimal reforms to the party, particularly if the party does not have an explicitly anti-democratic identity. At the other end of the spectrum, a party may be required to fully reinvent its image through extensive reforms. In these cases, the party makes a major break from its past identity, only maintaining symbolic connections to a few of its past achievements.
A political party can take two potential routes to success as it is defined above. Figure 2.1 shows these routes. The first route involves direct voter support. In this case, the party must utilize its resources to appeal to a sufficient number of voters to win a large enough vote share to govern with a majority of the vote (or plurality in the cases of minority parliamen- tary government or first-past-the-post presidential elections). This approach is particularly important in presidential systems due to the winner-take-all nature of presidential elections, and also very important in systems that largely depend on plurality-based electoral systems. Parties may also utilize manipulative tactics such as the abuse of state resources in election campaigns and custom-built institutions such as disproportionality in districting and high thresholds in proportional elections. In the second route shown in figure 2.1, a political party may become successful by winning the trust of other political parties in order to partici- pate in government as a coalition partner. This is more important in parliamentary systems with proportional elections where majority governments are the exception not the rule. This pathway requires the party to sufficiently demonstrate that it has changed its ways and broken with the non-competitive past.
Parties must have a sufficient degree of inherited ability that can be applied to winning competitive elections. Some traits that are important for a party to survive in competitive elections also overlap with those that bring success, like leadership and organization skills, a past record of accomplishments, and governing experience. Success is facilitated by parties that have a greater experience with skills more immediately translatable to competitive politics. The most valuable of these skills relate to the ability to mobilize voters in elections. This experience varies depending on the degree of what Sartori (1976) calls “simulated pluralism” that is allowed in the non-competitive regime. The least likely systems to be successful are those that do not have regular national elections. These should have little to no experience with the process of rallying support in an election campaign. A step up in competitive experience are those parties with experience holding one party, one candidate elections (Bratton and van de Walle’s (1997) plebiscitory systems). These have experience in mobilizing voters to turn out at the election (and ideally vote yes). Similarly, single party
Figure 2.1: Pathways to Success
competitive systems (using Bratton and van de Walle’s (1997) terminology again) provide parties with the experience in mobilization, but also have the added benefit of providing the party with candidates that are more experienced with competition. Finally, the most likely parties to succeed in competition are those that fall into Sartori’s (1976) concept of hegemonic parties like those in Mexico and Poland. These parties have the additional experience in competing against satellite parties with differing policy elements and adapting their platform based on the election results, even though victory was always assured.
The next constraining factor on success in competitive elections is the degree of opportu- nity that is available to the party. Party opportunity has two distinct elements to it. When parties are able to maintain power during the opening process, they retain the ability to utilize manipulation to augment their competitive abilities. In this case, party adaptation
on competitive skills to succeed. My approach to the use of competitive skills builds from Grzyma la-Busse (2002) and focuses on the ability of a party to adapt to multiparty politics through reinvention. I generalize her approach more broadly to consider whether a party is able to adapt by credibly reforming its identity to one congruent to the non-competitive era ideology.
When parties do not maintain control, they must be able to convert their old ideology into a new environment in a way that is both somewhat credible to voters and not already occupied by an opposition party. For example, a Stalinist party may reform their ideology to either nationalism or to social democracy. Parties may also take a conservative strategy, which as mentioned above is sufficient for survival, but not for a return to power if they are initially defeated. The success of reform also depends on whether the reform is to a viable position within the political environment after the opening. The nature of this environment can be illuminated by political cleavages prior to the non-competitive era Kitschelt et al. (1999). In some cases the ruling party may have built up a base within the electorate before restricting competition (as in Czechoslovakia) or alternatively the party was externally imposed over a
previous party system (as in Poland) (Kosteleck´y, 2002). Reform is particularly important
for what Panebianco (1988) calls parties with external sources of legitimacy. These parties lack a native support base like those with internal legitimacy and must translate institutional strength into a voting base. Though these parties have a disadvantage in that they are not able to fall back on as strong a base, they also have the advantage of being much more able to break with the non-competitive past. In some cases reforms may be extremely limited as there are few options available to the party due to either having an ideology that is difficult to transform or parties that predate the non-competitive system and/or existed in exile have occupied the available ideological space.
Although I do not seek to empirically test explanations for why political parties can and cannot make major changes in response to competition, I will briefly mention what I believe impacts this ability. Similarly to ideological flexibility, organizational flexibility is a factor in how capable a party is of adapting to competition. While party institutionalization has a
positive impact on survival and provides some of the critical elements for parties to succeed, it can also make reform difficult. One difficulty that has been noted with highly institutionalized political parties is an inability to change (Harmel and Janda, 1982). A party that has very strong connections to its core support base may have difficulty in changing course when politics become more competitive. Parties that are very deeply rooted in particular social or ethnic groups in domestic society are expected to have more difficulty in changing their identity.
In the case of Communist parties, this pattern is visible in the Russian and Czech parties, both of which had a strong domestic base of core supporters and a highly developed party organization before coming to power. In each of these cases the party did not significantly reform their policy platform and instead chose to shed the moderates from the party in order to maintain their position. Similarly, Communist successors in the peripheral Soviet Republics in Europe were at times able to cast aside their Marxist ideology, but retained an ethnic Russian identity. In contrast, Communist parties that were established at the close of World War II, such as the Polish Workers’ Party, were less deeply entrenched in society and were more able to make major alterations.
Party reform has both benefits and drawbacks. Reforming a party’s identity frees them from the harmful elements of their legacy, but in doing so sheds some of their inherited resources. Ultimately the decision of reforming a party is a gamble that a party can attract new supporters by breaking from the past, but at the same time not alienating the party’s core supporters in the process. A party that makes too many changes may weaken itself in such a way that makes success unattainable. A party that does not change enough may suffer from stagnation as they are never able to win enough new voters to govern.
The value of party reform is largely contingent on the legacy of the party. Many parties enter into competitive politics with highly defined ideologies to which multiparty democracy is anathema. For instance, Fascist and Marxist-Leninist ideologies enshrine the state and the vanguard party, respectively, as fundamentally non-competitive features of the regime. Beyond ideology, parties may also be connected to a particularly unpopular leader or sym-
bolic connection to the past. In order to break from that legacy, these parties will require a greater break from the past than others if they are to be competitive in post-opening politics. In other cases, major ideological reform may not be needed as the non-competitive regime utilized a vague or flexible ideology in the first place and thus has no ideological burden as is the case in many African single party systems. These parties, along with those having clearly defined identities that are relatively amenable to multi-party democracy (for instance, Socialists, Conservatives, etc.) have far less need to reform their identity. In fact, these parties should be punished for altering their identity, as they will alienate their base supporters and lose important resources inherited from the non-competitive era.