Party membership in autocracies : ruling parties' recruitment strategies and organizational strength

Abstract

Current literature on authoritarian politics suggests that ruling parties strengthen regime durability. However, our knowledge of how ruling party’s organizational strength is built is limited, resulting in a gap in addressing how ruling parties foster durability. I close this literature gap by focusing on the bottom of the ruling party’s hierarchy: non- professional party members. How do party members influence ruling party durability? In answering this question, I further break it down into a research path: what recruit- ment strategies can a ruling party implement? What is the effect of party membership on ruling party survival? Who applies to become a party member? What is the selec- tion criteria a ruling party employs when there is an oversupply of applicants? Why do citizens try to evade the recruitment process, and what is the socio-political outcome? I organize the dissertation into three primary sections. First, I propose a new framework of analysis on four membership recruitment strategies: democratic, elitist, sanctioned, and coercive. My argument pivots around two primary variables: political party penetration in society and access barriers. One of the direct outputs of access bar- riers is to impact membership growth, as a more challenging access requirement would decrease the number of possible new party members. Second, I argue that ruling parties need stable membership growth to secure dura- bility. I provide a wealth of evidence to support this conclusion. I present the “One- Party Membership Dataset” (OPAMED) as a new panel data on party membership across 44 ruling parties between 1945 and 2020. OPAMED is the most extensive panel data to date on party membership in autocracies, enclosing 1,845 year-observations. I then test the effect of ruling party organizational strength as an index to predict their survival. I apply OPAMED to answer questions related to ruling party penetration in society and party membership stability as drivers of party survival, concluding that the latter is highly effective while the former does not have significant power in predicting regime survival. Third, I use the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as case study to explore the challenges a ruling party faces in maintaining an extended low and stable recruitment growth during society’s fast socio-economic structural change. Here, I reveal the inter- action between citizens applying and the selection the CCP implements. I conclude that the CCP’s strategy to strengthen stability is to recruit the most valuable social group rather than the most supportive one. Finally, I implement a computational text analysis on 50 in-depth interviews I conducted with young Chinese professionals and present new evidence on their political reasons for not engaging with the CCP, which I define as latent political opposition behavior. Hence, the population can indirectly oppose the ruling party, which can present a stability challenge to the regime.