The One-Party Membership Dataset (OPAMED)

• In Event: Poster Session: Democracy & Autocracy

Abstract

In one-party regimes, the relationship between ruling party and citizens is of utmost importance for political system stability. As the ruling party organization structure is also composed of the rank-and-file (also known as “party masses”), party membership is an important facet of how ruling parties secure power. Ruling parties have mobilized, demobilized, and purged their own masses, pointing at the complex survival strategies pursued by ruling party officials. Current authoritarian comparative literature has highlighted the elite bargaining politics as crucial for regime survival. I argue that, in one-party regimes, party membership strategies are another fundamental tool to study ruling party governance, internal stability, and party-society relationship.

The recent comparative authoritarian literature has focused on state institutions, state-society relationships, and elite politics within the ruling party. This literature has also tested elite-centric explanations for authoritarian demise. These approaches nevertheless understate the ruling party’s role within one-party regimes, neglecting the political strategies implemented by one of the core political institutions. As a result, current literature has yet to conceptualize recruitment strategies that strengthen or hinder party survival. The primary reasons for this overseen factor are the lack of comparative studies on selection strategies and the fragmented data on party membership yearly variation among one-party regimes.

To overcome these challenges, I present the One-Party Membership Dataset (OPAMED) as the first dataset focusing on party membership at the mass level. The article contributes to the current literature in three ways. First, it expands the knowledge on ruling parties’ organizational structures in one-party regimes. OPAMED features 1,845 year-observations on party membership in 42 ruling parties during the 1945-2020 period. It allows extensive comparative studies on recruitment strategies, creates the foundations to explain within-party variation, and opens the path to test survival analyses from a bottom-up standpoint. Second, it introduces two new variables to test the party-society relationship: ruling party penetration and membership stability. These two dimensions are fundamental to further exploring ruling party strength and parties’ approaches to the party-society relationship. Third, it applies these variables to research questions related to geographic and ideology differences, historical persistence and leadership transitions, and it shows how to detect events such as purges, opening new paths of research on comparative political institutions.

Author

• Fabio Angiolillo, Gothenburg University