Civil society actors collectively organized online and offline to nominate themselves and oppose the Vietnamese Communist Party in the 2016 legislative election. The level of opposition coordination among these independent self-nominees exceeded and qualitatively differed from previous atomized attempts in the 2011 election. External shifts in the political opportunity structure offer only a partial explanation for the increased coordination among independent candidates in Vietnam's 2016 self-nomination movement. In this article, I theorize that it is the combination of both opportunity structure and overlapping linkages across spheres of social contention and civil society, all accumulated from a prior history of protests and activism, that provide the conditions for the emergence of independent self-nominees and opposition coordination in single-party-elections. In Vietnam, a cumulative process of participation in social contention and civil society organizations during 2011 to 2016 allowed actors to develop linkages that strengthened their repertoires of contention and resonant frames of collective action. These linkages, combined with favorable political opportunities, effectively facilitated greater mobilization and coordination among independent self-nominees in the 2016 election.
Despite the focus in the extant literature on the significance of institutions to the stability of nondemocratic regimes, little attention has been paid to the relationship between institutionalization and authoritarian legitimation. In a review of three recent works, the article proposes the importance of considering this relationship alongside analyses of institutional change within the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Based on Max Weber's conceptualization of the rational-legal basis of legitimate domination, the article thus examines the extent to which institutionalization contributes to the legitimacy and durability of the CCP. Through a survey of the relevant scholarship, the article finally suggests that institutions under the CCP lack the high degree of "calculability" required under Weber's definition of rational-legal institutions, which raises questions regarding their ability to command "legal authority."
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