The incentives for pre-electoral coalitions in non-democratic elections

Abstract

What are the incentives of opposition parties to coordinate their electoral strategies to challenge authoritarian incumbents? Are these incentives the same in non-democracies as in democracies? A well-formed literature on party competition in established democracies points to the importance of mostly institutional factors in determining whether parties form pre-electoral coalitions. We find, however, that many of these institutional factors have only modest effects on the formation of opposition coalitions in authoritarian elections. As a consequence, we discuss the ways in which authoritarian elections differ from democratic ones, focusing on how these differences affect the incentives of parties to form coalitions. Analysing original data on party competition in legislative elections in all non-democracies from 1946 to 2006, we find that electoral repression and the stability of parties influence the emergence of pre-electoral coalitions among opposition parties.