The Party is dead, long live the party!: successor party adaptation to democracy

ENThe twentieth century closed with the demise of scores of single-party authoritarian regimes and ushered in democracy on four continents. Authoritarian regime collapse, however, did not portend the death of all the parties that had sustained oppressive single-party systems for decades. Some ex-hegemonic parties celebrated victories in democratic elections, while others failed to appeal to voters. This dissertation explains while some ex-hegemonic parties manage to extend their lifespan under democratic conditions while others fail or even disappear. I argue that the leaders of successful ex-hegemonic parties have designed their parties' adaptation strategies in response to the electoral environment they compete in. Ex-hegemonic parties participating in competitive elections must choose candidates and devise messages that appeal to large segments of the electorate. Some ex-hegemonic parties fail because their leaders overestimate voters' support for their orthodox (pre-democratic) ideology or fail to devise adaptation strategies in response to the incentives of the electoral system they compete in. Competitive elections push the leaders of ex-hegemonic parties to tailor their candidate recruitment practices, the types of candidates they nominate, and their parties' ideological messages to appeal to voters. The particular mix of recruitment practices, candidate type, and ideology needed to attract winning numbers of votes, however, depends on specific elements of the electoral system. Electoral systems that encourage candidate-centered campaign strategies motivate party leaders to involve local politicians in candidate recruitment decisions and to shun candidates with authoritarian links; in candidate-centered systems voters know who the candidates are and focus their decisions on candidate characteristics.Party-centered systems, in contrast, prompt leaders to attract voters with moderate ideological messages reflected in their party programs. In these systems, policy positions are more important than in candidate-centered systems because voters may not even know the names of individual candidates. Hybrid systems mix the incentives and induce changes in both candidate recruitment and ideological. Empirical analysis of several cases demonstrates the effects of electoral institutions on the strategies that have helped ex-hegemonic parties make the transition to democracy. My analysis shows that in the Czech Republic (which has a candidate-centered system) democratizing candidate selection has allowed the ex-communists to sustain their appeal among voters and keep the party in the political game. In countries with party-centered or hybrid systems, however, ideological moderation and programmatic appeals to large social democratic constituencies have kept ex-communist parties at the helm. Such systems include those in Bulgaria, Hungary, and Lithuania.