The Origins of Dominant Parties

Building Authoritarian Institutions in Post-Soviet Russia

Ora John Reuter

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781107171763
• eBook ISBN: 9781316774274
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In many autocracies, regime leaders share power with a ruling party, which can help generate popular support and reduce conflict among key elites. Such ruling parties are often called dominant parties. In other regimes, leaders prefer to rule solely through some combination of charisma, patronage, and coercion, rather than sharing power with a dominant party. This book explains why dominant parties emerge in some nondemocratic regimes, but not in others. It offers a novel theory of dominant party emergence that centers on the balance of power between rulers and other elites. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Russia, original data on Russian political elites, and cross-national statistical analysis, the book's findings shed new light on how modern autocracies work and why they break down. The book also provides new insights about the foundations of Vladimir Putin's regime and challenges several myths about the personalization of power under Putin.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Table of contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 A Theory of Dominant Party Formation
• 3 False Starts
• 4 The Emergence of a Dominant Party in Russia
• 5 United Russia as the Dominant Party
• 6 United Russia and Russia’s Governors
• 7 Economic Elites and Dominant Party Affiliation
• 8 Dominant Party Emergence around the World
• 9 Conclusion
• References
• Index