Why do some political parties descended from dictatorships accept democracy while others attack it? I argue that whether an authoritarian successor party accepts democracy depends less on the voters it faces than on whom it inherits from its predecessor regime: its “personnel endowment.” Successor parties inherit an exclusionary cadre of elites, whose convictions are least compatible with rule by popular consent, to the extent that their predecessor regimes built politics around loyalty to a leader rather than around impersonal institutions. In an original dataset of parties competing after second- and third-wave transitions, successors to more personalized regimes are more likely to reject the rules of electoral democracy. This effect is specific to successor parties, confined to rejection of democracy’s rules rather than its norms, and persists through the first two decades of democracy. Archival evidence from Chile shows how one regime’s endowment can split: elites formed in defense of the Pinochet regime concentrated in the intransigent UDI, while those formed in its 1980s political opening shaped the more reform-minded RN. The UDI deliberately reproduced its inheritance through selective recruitment, suggesting one explanation for the endurance of the personalization effect identified cross-nationally.

How does the authoritarian past influence partisan electoral coalition-building in post-democratization contexts? This paper explores the strategies of authoritarian successor parties (ASPs)—parties with roots in past authoritarian regimes—in shaping their support bases in the wake of transitions to democracy. In particular, the paper explores the reasons why and mechanisms through which ASPs either entrench regime-era political alignments (coalition-maintenance), or seek to construct broader bases of electoral support among the population (coalition-building). Arguing these patterns to be rooted in authoritarian-era networks—whether established through coercion or co-optation—this paper constructs a theory of continuity and disruption in the transmission of political loyalties from the past to the present, positing political parties as crucial mediators in the process. Cross-national analyses show that successor parties distribute in the same way, and to the same people, as their predecessor regimes, and that these effects are weaker where transitions are highly disruptive—where regime-era networks are less likely to survive a transition intact. Using fine-grained municipal-level political spending data in the context of post-Pinochet Chile, this paper then links authoritarian successor parties’ local-level behaviors of resource allocation and coalition-construction to pre-transition patterns of control, clientelism, and coercion, showing that successor party spending tracks locally inherited coalitions from the regime.

This paper examines how rebel governance in civil conflict affects the organizational capacity and performance of rebel successor parties in the post-conflict period. Specifically, we seek to understand the relationship between the nature of wartime rebel governance institutions, and indicators of postwar rebel successor party organizational strength, local presence, internal cohesion, and breadth of support. We hypothesize that parties succeeding rebel groups with a history of more extensive wartime institutionalization should be better-connected and have greater mobilizational capacity in the postwar period. A cross-national empirical analysis at the party-election-year level establishes the validity of our theory. Further, in a case study of the FMLN in El Salvador, we use archival materials to illustrate the link between the group's wartime institutionalization and their transition to a successful political party. We nuance this with an analysis of El Salvador's municipality-level electoral dynamics in the wake of the conflict as a function of the FMLN's wartime territorial control and institutionalization. Results show that territorial control was negatively associated with the capacity of rival parties to establish local presence, thus shedding light on the complex ways in which wartime institutionalization drives postwar electoral outcomes for rebel successor parties.