Political Party Opposition to Noncompetitive Regimes: A Cross-National Analysis

Many competitive parties have witnessed the overthrow of competitive regimes, but the activities of political parties under noncompetitive regimes have received very little scholarly attention. Several authors suggest that parties, constrained in their conventional activities, will take part in protest or political violence (referred to here as contentious political action). I first examine the activities of 51 political parties in 24 non-- competitive regimes and establish that a majority of these parties (over 62 percent) did take part in contentious political action. Second, I attempt to explain the great variance in the incidence of party-led dissent using the theoretical framework of the political process-opportunities approach. A multivariate analysis suggests that parties will take part in greater levels of contention when the country's government has been criticized for human rights abuses, when repression of party organizations is low, and when repression of party leaders is at an intermediate level. Political parties in many developing democracies have faced the imposition of noncompetitive regimes. An important but neglected question concerns what parties do in this situation. Several scholars suggest that political parties, facing limits on their ability to compete for power through elections and legislatures, will respond with unconventional, contentious tactics (Dahl 1973; Blondel 1997; Aminzade 1995). In this article, I first examine whether or not parties facing noncompetitive regimes actively resist. I find that many parties do resist and that there is considerable variance in the incidence (frequency and duration) of contentious acts in which parties took part. Some parties organized massive, sustained campaigns of resistance against the noncompetitive regime, while others took part in protests quite infrequently, and several parties never openly resisted the noncompetitive regime at all. In the second part of this article, I attempt to explain these substantial differences in the incidence of contentious action which parties take part. Theoretical propositions are derived from the literature on contentious politics. These propositions are tested for a sample of 51 political parties in 24 countries. The findings show that these differences can best be explained by variances in the levels of repression and by opportunities created by external criticism of the government's human rights record. DO PARTIES RESIST? Several works from the literature on political oppositions suggest that disloyal and unconventional opposition strategies are more likely to occur in regimes that do not allow significant inter-party competition. Dahl (1973: 13) asserts that in such noncompetitive regimes, "opposition that would be loyal if it were tolerated becomes disloyal because it is not tolerated." Furthermore, Blondel (1997: 473) argues that the fact that "the government decrees that no opposition party is allowed does not mean that opposition parties do not exist or even that these bodies are silent: indeed opposition may well be (or become) more radical and indeed probably more violent where it is not overtly tolerated than where it is tolerated." Aminzade (1995) offers an example in which this principle is applied. He shows that the French Republican Party, which had preferred parliamentary tactics under a relatively democratic regime, changed its tactics to disruptive, unconventional political action after the laws ensuring effective party competition were overturned by the government. Therefore, we can derive the testable assertion that opposition parties will respond to the establishment of noncompetitive regimes by using unconventional political strategies, which we can refer to as contentious political action. Developing the Sample While a few authors have studied the contentious activities of political parties in particular countries (e.g., Constable and Valenzuela 1991; Kinzo 1988; Valenzuela and Valenzuela 1986), I know of no comparative studies. …