This study examines the role of autocratic ruling party strength in democratic transitions. While the impact of ruling party strength on regime stability is extensively studied, we know much less about how ruling party strength influences prospects for democratization during regime transitions. Proceeding from recent studies that suggest autocratic incumbents often choose to democratize from a position of strength rather than weakness, I discuss how specific attributes strong ruling party organizations wield can provide autocratic incumbents with incentives and capabilities to lead democratization in the context of regime change. Using original data on organizational characteristics of 161 autocratic ruling parties between 1970 and 2015, I provide the first set of systematic empirical evidence supporting the argument that ruling party organizational features that promote regime durability can simultaneously facilitate the implementation of substantial democratizing reforms by regime elites in a top-down fashion to preempt political opposition.
Although party organization plays a key role in a range of theories from democratic accountability and representation to democratic breakdown or the electoral success and persistence of parties, data on party organizational features is quite sparse, scattered and available for a limited set of countries and parties. To advance global research on party organizations, we present the Varieties of Party Identity and Organization Dataset (V-Party) -the most comprehensive dataset to date, including a wide range of information about organizational features and party stances of more than 1,900 parties in 168 countries between 1970 and 2019. Here, we focus on new measures of parties' territorial reach, ties to social organizations, candidate nomination procedures, personalization, and internal cohesion. Focusing on the organizational features of political parties, we demonstrate the usefulness and the potential of V-Party following Adcock and Collier's ( 2001) three-pronged strategy to showcase V-Party's face, criterion and construct validity.
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