This volume examines the emergence, success, and consequences of authoritarian successor parties (ASPs). While specific ASPs, such as Mexico’s PRI or Argentina’s PJ, have been well studied by specialists, they are often treated as sui generis cases with little attention to the broader phenomenon of which they are a part. Life After Dictatorship aims to resolve this shortcoming in the literature by bringing together works by scholars specializing in cases that span the globe. Readers primarily interested in Latin America will find three chapters that focus specifically on the region, along with substantial engagement with Latin American cases in both the introduction and the conclusion.
The chapters are written by top scholars in the field and are of consistently high quality. The introduction presents a concise definition of ASPs and a theoretical framework that facilitates global comparison. The subsequent contributions are organized thematically rather than geographically. Each section addresses a different, puzzling aspect of the phenomenon: the existence of ASPs, the electoral success of ASPs, and the diverse effects of ASPs on democracy. This organization is explicitly intended to encourage cross-regional conversations. Indeed, Life After Dictatorship has an impressive global dimension, covering cases from Latin America, Europe, Africa, and East Asia. Despite their wide-ranging geographic concentrations, the individual contributors do a remarkable job of consistently utilizing the theoretical framework and engaging with each other’s arguments. The conclusion revisits key arguments, explores related phenomena, and ponders the future of ASPs. As a result of its quality and coherent structure, the volume is well worth reading from start to finish.
The volume makes a number of important contributions to the broader field of comparative politics. First, it provides a robust theoretical framework that enables constructive conversations between scholars with very different geographic specializations. Loxton’s portable definition of ASPs as “parties that emerge from authoritarian regimes, but that operate after a transition to democracy” (2), for example, results in a broad but clearly delimited universe of cases. A second, related contribution is the way the volume raises awareness of the magnitude of the phenomenon of ASPs. Often understood as idiosyncratic manifestations of national political dynamics, ASPs are actually remarkably widespread: by Loxton’s count, they are present in fully 72 percent of Third Wave democracies and have returned to power in 53 percent of them. Those who specialize in studying the PRI in Mexico, for example, or the UDI and RN in Chile will find solace and company when perusing the long list of parties in appendix 1.2 (37–49).
Indeed, ASPs are virtually ubiquitous in the Latin America’s Third Wave democracies, having achieved notable electoral successes in Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, and Peru. In addition, the second wave of democratization also produced prominent ASPs in Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela (117–18).
The key concepts of authoritarian inheritance and authoritarian baggage, presented by Loxton in the introduction and applied consistently throughout the volume, are also valuable. Authoritarian inheritance refers to the useful endowments ASPs receive from the previous regime. These can range from a well-developed clientelistic network to a popular party brand. Authoritarian baggage, in contrast, refers to the burdens of the past that limit ASPs’ electoral effectiveness under democracy, such as reputations for corruption and ineptitude or a record of human rights violations. Throughout the volume, reliance on these concepts provides a common vocabulary and facilitates the analysis.
As some contributors note, however, the significance of particular types of inheritance or baggage can vary substantially across cases and over time. A reputation for managerial efficiency, as Anna Grzymala-Busse notes in her chapter on Eastern Europe, may ultimately lead to a party’s collapse if it fails to live up to expectations, as happened to ASPs in Poland and Hungary (170). In contrast, Levitsky and Loxton note that reliance on a leader tainted by serious human rights violations can be a boon if poor democratic performance generates nostalgia for a more orderly past, as in Guatemala (124–25). Moreover, as T. J. Cheng and Teh-fu Huang note in their discussion of Taiwan and South Korea, shifting issue dynamics may dramatically alter the value (or cost) of a particular inheritance or baggage. Across the volume there are recurrent references to double-edged phenomena, suggesting that the inheritance-baggage distinction is not always clear-cut.
Yet the very ambiguities surrounding inheritance and baggage are also evidence that cross-regional comparisons are potentially quite valuable. Life After Dictatorship effectively juxtaposes different cases in ways that invite reflection. Scholars familiar with particular ASPs or with the politics of a given region will find thought-provoking similarities and differences between those and cases from world regions with which they are less familiar. Thus, scholars of clientelism in Latin America may enjoy chapters by Rachel Beatty Riedl and Adrienne LeBas dealing with Sub-Saharan Africa, and those interested in the construction and failure of party brands will see interesting parallels in both Grzymala-Busse’s discussion of post-Communist Europe and Cheng and Huang’s analysis of Taiwan and Korea.
Even though the volume is clearly intended to facilitate these conversations, it also devotes substantial attention specifically to Latin America. The three chapters dealing exclusively with the region are conveniently distributed across all three of the volume’s main thematic sections. As a result, these contributions provide a neat cross-section of the volume as a whole.
Levitsky and Loxton focus on Latin America to examine ASPs organized and initially led by personalistic dictators. A remarkable majority of the ASPs in Latin America are directly linked to individual authoritarian rulers, such as Juan Perón and the PJ in Argentina or Omar Torrijos and the PRD in Panama. The success of these organizations appears doubly puzzling, as Levistky and Loxton point out, since neither personalism nor authoritarian roots are typically seen as conducive to electoral success under democracy (118–21). Yet their analysis points to different ways that being led by an ex-dictator can enhance electoral performance, most notably by guaranteeing a substantial share of votes and enhancing party cohesion (122–28). The predictable problem of succession is a serious one, and most organizations fail when their leaders die. However, a handful of cases, such as the PJ and the PRD, have succeeded in depersonalizing and becoming durable features of the electoral landscape.
In his chapter, Timothy Power compares the divergent trajectories of Brazil’s two ASPs, the PDS/PP and the PFL/DEM, in order to explain the differences in their electoral success. For the first two decades after the democratic transition, the PFL/DEM was the more successful of the two, but after the rise of the Workers’ Party (PT) in 2002, the PDS/PP proved better able to adapt to the new political environment. Power argues that access to state resources was central to explaining the success of each party, with the PFL/DEM initially better positioned to maintain control of its subnational strongholds and provide support for national incumbents. However, the PFL/DEM was effectively undercut by the PT in the Northeast, and the PDS/PP proved better able to work with PT administrations (232–33). Going against the grain of much of the volume, Power argues that despite their clear status as ASPs, the behavior of these parties is not primarily driven by authoritarian inheritance or baggage, but instead by their strategic positioning as parties in a democracy (250).
Gustavo Flores-Macías examines Mexico’s PRI and considers the factors that contributed to its endurance, as well as its consequences for democracy. In doing so, Flores-Macías pushes back against the notion that ASPs consistently contribute to democratic consolidation. While Dan Slater and Joseph Wong argue that ASPs stabilized democracy in Taiwan and Korea and Daniel Ziblatt points to the critical role of old regime conservative parties in the emergence of democratic regimes in Europe, Flores-Macías has only the faintest of counterfactual praise for the PRI (279). Instead, he points to its entrenchment in authoritarian enclaves and its corrupt corporatist practices as a major source of Mexico’s democratic dysfunction (280–82), finding that the effects of PRI endurance have been almost entirely negative for Mexico.
The most substantial contribution of Life After Dictatorship lies precisely in the way it enables discussions among different country and regional specialists. The unexpected magnitude of the phenomenon is appropriately emphasized, and should serve as a good starting point for further research. These conversations are far from exhaustive: one interesting limitation of the volume is that beyond the introduction and conclusion, only the chapter by Herbert Kitschelt and Matthew Singer on clientelistic linkages explicitly engages in cross-regional comparison.
There is also a sense of urgency here. The recurrent observation that being associated with an authoritarian regime does not doom a party after transition, and indeed that it proves to be a substantial predictor of posttransition durability and success, is an important one in an age of growing uncertainty about the future of democracy. Authoritarianism is not universally despised, and its heirs and advocates are not always political pariahs.
