Managing Opposition: Extra-Regime Sources of Authoritarian Durability

Scholars of authoritarian durability have focused our attention on incumbent-controlled institutions, such as legislatures and ruling parties, which they argue facilitate bargaining within ruling coalitions and thereby stabilize regimes. But authoritarian durability may also be a product of the resources and organizational capital available to potential state challengers.

By concentrating on state institutions almost exclusively, scholars have neglected the way that different authoritarian regimes have used – and occasionally created – autonomous social institutions to manage popular constituencies and mobilize popular support. By examining several cases in Sub-Saharan Africa, LeBas suggests that these "opposition management strategies" vary across regimes and help to explain the timing and character of regime breakdown. Her paper concludes with a reflection on how authoritarian social control may affect party system development after transition.

Adrienne LeBas (PhD, Columbia University) is Assistant Professor of Government at American University in Washington, DC. Prior to joining AU, LeBas was a Prize Research Fellow at Nuffield College, University of Oxford, and Assistant Professor of Political Science and African Studies at Michigan State University. Her research interests include social movements, democratization, and the rule of law. She is the author of the award-winning From Protest to Parties: Party-Building and Democratization in Africa (Oxford University Press, 2011) as well as articles in the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Politics, the Journal of Democracy, and elsewhere. LeBas worked as a consultant for Human Rights Watch in Zimbabwe, where she lived from 2002 to 2003. In 2015-2016, she will be a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center of Scholars in DC, where she will be working on a new book on electoral violence.