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¹⁶ Langston attributes elite ruptures in the PRI as well as the KMT in Taiwan to increased electoral competition and succession crises; Langston, Joy, ‘Elite Ruptures: When Do Ruling Parties Split?’ in Andreas Schedler, ed., Electoral Authoritarianism: The Dynamics of Unfree Competition (Boulder, Col.: Lynne Rienner, 2006), pp. 57–76Google Scholar. Analysing the same cases, Haggard and Kaufman find no relationship between crisis and elite defection in dominant party autocracies while finding substantial case-study evidence for the linkage in Latin American military regimes (Haggard and Kaufman, The Political Economy of Democratic Transitions).

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¹⁸ However, we did conduct a separate analysis which shows that defections have a positive effect on the probability of a hegemonic regime losing power.

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²³ While we have theoretical foundations for the 50 per cent cut point, we also examine whether the choice of threshold affects our results by including an interaction term between economic growth and the seat share of the dominant party in the statistical analysis. In this way, rather than impose an ex ante criterion, we allow the data to ‘speak’ as to whether the choice of threshold affects the results. The results, to be discussed, show that the size of the hegemonic party’s legislative majority does not condition the effect of growth on defections.

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²⁵ As with the choice of seat share threshold, we examine whether durability affects the results and is thereby justified as a criterion, by including an interaction term between duration and growth in the statistical analysis. As we show, the age of the hegemonic party does not appreciably affect the substantive results.

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³⁰ While the literature on economic voting includes a large debate on this point, there is some evidence that voters evaluate incumbents based on economic performance. See, for example, Lewis-Beck, Michael, Economics and Elections: The Major Western Democracies (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Remmer, Karen, ‘The Political Impact of Economic Crisis in Latin America in the 1980s’, American Political Science Review, 85 (1991), 777–800CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Powell, G. Bingham Jr and Whitten, Guy, ‘A Cross-National Analysis of Economic Voting: Taking Account of the Political Context’, American Journal of Political Science, 37 (1993), 391–414CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pacek, Alexander and Radcliff, Benjamin, ‘The Political Economy of Competitive Elections in the Developing World’, American Journal of Political Science, 39 (1995), 745–759CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Duch, Raymond and Stevenson, Randy, ‘Assessing the Magnitude of the Economic Vote over Time and Across Nations’, Electoral Studies, 25 (2005), 528–547CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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³⁹ Since we cannot gather information on all legislative candidates in parliamentary regimes, we look only at the founders and leaders of parties in parliamentary regimes. If the founders and/or leaders of an opposition party were members of the hegemonic party prior to the election, this counts as a defection.

⁴⁰ For information on the sources used for all variables in the analysis, see the author’s webpage: http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~oreuter/Reuter_Site/Home.html

⁴¹ We recognize that this coding rule may exclude instances in which a potential defector challenges the regime with the precise goal of being expelled. But we choose not to code these cases as defection, for admitting such cases would also oblige us to include regime-initiated purges in which notable party members are simply expelled against their own will.

⁴² We also test the effect of long-run economic growth (i.e. the average growth rate over the life of the hegemonic party) and one-year lag of economic growth. As we discuss below, the results are highly similar.

⁴³ Marshall, Monty G. and Jaggers, Keith, Polity IV Project: Political Regime Characteristics and Transitions, 1800–2002. Version p4v2002e [Computer File]. College Park: Center for International Development and Conflict Management, University of Maryland, 2002URL: http://www.cidcm.umd.edu/inscr/polity/index.htmGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁴ If there is no prior presidential election, we take the regime party’s vote total in the prior legislative election. In the first elections after single-party rule, Previous Vote receives a value of 100. In the first elections after independence, we take the hegemonic party’s vote share in elections for territorial or colonial assemblies.

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⁴⁷ Recent studies using cross-national electoral data with low country (N) to time-period (T) ratios such as ours (3.8 elections per hegemonic party) have settled on this approach (see Golder, Matthew, ‘Presidential Coattails and Legislative Fragmentation’, American Journal of Political Science, 50 (2006), 34–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Hicken, Allen, Building Party Systems in Developing Democracies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Including a lagged dependent variable to correct for serial autocorrelation within units is impractical given the large number of observations that would be lost and the uneven spacing between elections. Even so, models that include Past Defections (a measure of whether a hegemonic party has experienced a defection at some time in the past) as a control variable reveal little indication of temporal dependence.

⁴⁸ However, reverse causation is possible in that a defection may affect the vote share of an incumbent in the contemporaneous election. Also, this variable is highly correlated with both Polity and Previous Vote. Indeed, when removing Vote Share from Model 2, Previous Vote becomes significant. Therefore, in most of the subsequent models we use Previous Vote in place of Vote Share to circumvent the endogeneity problems posed by Vote Share.

⁴⁹ The importance of opportunity structure in determining the likelihood of defection raises the issue of endogenous elections. If dictators anticipate elite defections from their coalitions in upcoming elections, they can cancel elections, opening the possibility for selection effects that may bias our results. Upon investigating cancelled elections, we found that dictators in party regimes cancel elections very infrequently. In Africa, for example, scheduled elections were cancelled only four times (i.e. Angola 1997 and 2002, Burkina Faso in 1974, and Guinea-Bissau in 1992). Given the rarity of cancelled elections, we choose not to use a selection model because the skewness of the dependent variable in the first stage (cancelled elections) will produce highly inefficient and possibly biased estimates of covariates that affect the decision to hold elections and of the Inverse Mill’s Ratio. In addition, since the severity of selection bias is directly proportional to the percentage of the sample that is truncated, we are sanguine about the robustness of our results in the face of potential selection bias.

⁵⁰ The model shown includes only Sub-Saharan Africa as a control variable. In other results, we tested other regional dummies and found them to be collectively insignificant.

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⁵² We are grateful to Joseph Wright for providing his update of Geddes’s regime classification from Wright, ‘Do Authoritarian Institutions Constrain?’

⁵³ We also attempted to proxy the propensity of the regime to use repression with a variable that measures the number of ‘purges’ in a given year, where purges are defined as any systematic jailing or execution of political opposition by the regime. See Banks, Arthur, Cross-National Time Series Data Archive 〈http://www.databanksinternational.com/32.html〉 (2005). This variable was not significantGoogle Scholar.

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⁵⁸ We also examined this alternative hypothesis by including per capita income. The coefficient on income is never significantly different from 0 while the effects of other variables remain substantively unchanged.

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⁶⁰ Historical accounts suggest that the elections were marred by irregularities. Moreover, the elections were called early so as to exploit the opposition’s inability to organize. Although the official results were never made public, the CHP retained a commanding parliamentary majority. See Bahrampour, Firouz, Turkey: Political and Social Transformation (Brooklyn, N.Y.: Theo. Gaus’ Sons, 1967), p. 20Google Scholar; Karpat, Kemal, Turkey’s Politics (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959)Google Scholar.

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⁶⁵ As Weiker, The Turkish Revolution, points out, where the laws were not inherently anti-democratic, their selective interpretation and enforcement were.

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⁷⁵ The party faced difficulties building a national organization and fared poorly in the general elections of October 1957, winning 3.7 per cent of the vote and four seats. Months later the party merged with CHP.

⁷⁶ Some sources suggest that the DP was adopting more and more authoritarian practices in 1954 and 1955; see Karpat, ‘The Turkish Elections of 1957’, and Weiker, The Turkish Revolution. We readily acknowledge the difficulty in determining whether the Freedom party defections occurred because dissatisfaction with the DP’s growing authoritarianism reached some tipping point in 1955 or whether it was due solely to the economic crisis. We can only re-emphasize that the timing of Celikhbas’s decision to introduce the draft amendment, and the subsequent split from the party came just weeks after the September Istanbul riots, which occurred in response to the economic crisis.

⁷⁷ ZANU was Mugabe’s original party, incorporating the Patriotic Front shortly before independence. This alliance briefly broke down during the 1980 elections when the PF’s original leader, Joshua Nkomo, contested the elections as PF-ZAPU while Mugabe campaigned under the partisan label of ZANU-PF.

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