Explaining the Success of Opposition Coalitions against Autocrats

• In Event: Political Parties in Transitional Democracies and Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

Under what conditions are opposition-led electoral coalitions likely to win the election? In this study, I aim to understand whether forming an opposition coalition against the incumbent is a successful strategy or not. I argue that the competitiveness of opposition coalitions in autocracies is directly shaped by the behavior of their fellow incumbents. Preliminary analysis shows that there are several factors that create fertile ground for opposition PEC success. First, the economic weakness of the incumbent creates higher chances of opposition success. Second, high levels of political polarization also contribute to opposition success. There are also two important factors creating hurdles for the opposition coalition. If the incumbent forms a coalition within a specific election, this lowers the likelihood of the opposition coalition's success. Also, in these countries, the overall time spent in an autocratic regime decreases the likelihood of opposition success in the elections. Results are robust to different specifications and estimators.
There are two major contributions to this paper. First, there is little evidence in the literature whether this strategy is working against the incumbent or not. Existing studies do not offer any cross-sectional evidence or focus on these coalitions ability to democratize these autocracies (Wahman (2013), for instance). Second, this research combines evidence from an original dataset of opposition and incumbent-led coalitions in electoral authoritarian regimes and a controlled comparison case study to shed light on factors explaining opposition success.
In this research, I rely on an original dataset that covers every national election between 1970 and 2020. The main unit of analysis is a country's election year. Out of 459 elections in which the opposition formed a coalition, only 28% of the time the opposition wins the election. At this stage of this paper, I have conducted the preliminary analysis. The opposition coalition's success is a binary variable: 1 means the opposition won, and 0 means the opposition coalition lost. Thus, I use the fixed effects logit model to account for the panel data characteristics of my data. The results are robust to binomial logistic regression, the rare events model, and penalized GLM.

Author

• Ozlem Tuncel Gurlek, Georgia State University