Political parties have been a common feature in non-competitive political systems, but their fates following an opening of electoral competition vary widely. Some parties continue to be able successfully compete for power, while many others languish as second-class political parties for decades. This dissertation seeks to answer the questions on this variation based on the institutional and organizational characteristics of these parties during the non-competitive era. Parties that play a major role in the non-competitive regime should be more likely to survive after an opening of competition, and parties that are able to reform anti-democratic legacies will be more able to translate their resources into future electoral success. This project builds on a literature that is rich in regional and sub-regional case studies by developing a global approach based upon comparable institutional qualities of non-competitive political systems and their ruling political parties. I also move away from the transitions literature and its focus on democracy, and instead focus on continuity and change in political parties after a time of major political change and the outcomes of that process. I develop an original, global database of 105 different regimes and 136 parties and their successors and their performance in elections ranging from 1975-2013. I find that parties which are a central institutional feature of the non-competitive regime are likely to survive regardless of their electoral success, while parties that play only a minor supporting role in the prior regime are dependent on continued electoral victories in order to survive for any significant period of time.

The literature on authoritarian politics emphasises the threat unexpected shocks such as economic downturns or political and security challenges pose for regime stability. However, we know relatively little about how incumbents can influence the process by which citizens evaluate government performance and attribute blame in non-democratic regimes. To gain insights into these questions, I study how government responses to collective shocks to citizen income and security influence support for electoral authoritarian regimes, i.e. those that combine authoritarian practices with multiparty elections. I propose that when shocks make information about government performance publicly observable, illiberal governments can take action that moderates or ameliorates their effect on the levels of support they enjoy. Little constrained by constitutional rules, critical media or coalition partners, electoral authoritarians can use tactical redistribution to appease the discontented electorate on the one hand and propaganda to manipulate attributions of responsibility for the shock on the other. Repression against opposition parties and activists in this context is used rarely, and only after targeted transfers and propaganda have failed to prevent support from eroding and crowds from taking to the streets. The thesis illustrates arguments with the case of contemporary Russia - an electoral authoritarian regime with high levels of personalist rule - and leverages evidence from government and citizen responses to natural disasters, economic downturns, terror attacks and electoral protests. Empirical analysis combines original datasets on the framing of economic news in Kremlin-controlled media, the forced dismissals of government actors, the provision of tactical redistribution, and the use of repression against opposition parties and activists with over 60,000 responses from nationally and regionally representative public opinion surveys. Bringing new data and evidence from individual-level surveys to bear on the debate of how non-democratic governments manage public opinion, the thesis makes an original contribution to scholarship on authoritarian vulnerability and resilience.

What determines governance quality in authoritarian settings? The existing literature on governance concentrates on democratic governance and provides no ready answer. By focusing on the world’s largest authoritarian country, China, this study delineates an authoritarian model of governance quality. In the model, I argue that in order for good governance to occur, an authoritarian government must have both the ability and the desire to govern well, and the current authoritarian government in China has both. Specifically, its ability to govern well comes from 1) its sovereignty within the territory, 2) its fiscal resources, and 3) its party-state structure blended with decentralization, term and age limits, and performance-based promotion. Its desire to govern well comes from 1) the regime’s need for political legitimacy; 2) good governance as an important source of political legitimacy; 3) the decay of alternative sources of legitimacy; 4) the double uncertainty of authoritarian politics that compels leaders to highly active in delivering good governance. I formulate key hypotheses and test them with a variety of original datasets. The Chinese County Governance Data are collected from county government websites. The data on county-level public opinion are constructed through Multilevel Regression and Poststratification (MRP) based on the 2010 Chinese General Social Survey and the 2000 national census data. County leader characteristics are collected from Database of Local Officials. The empirical analysis general supports the model. My study reveals an authoritarian logic of governance which centers on the party state’s top-down control and the regime’s insecurity about political legitimacy. My study also demonstrates that China’s model of governance is not shared by most authoritarian countries today.

How do authoritarian stales foster civil society growth while keeping unruly organizations in line? This governance dilemma dogs every state that attempts to modernize by permitting civil society to pluralize while minding its potential to stir up restive social forces. This dissertation's main finding is that the Chinese party state the world's largest and arguably the most resilient authoritarian regime-has engineered a flexible institution of state control in which the "rules of the game" arc created, disseminated, and enforced outside of institutionalized channels. This dissertation demonstrates how the coercive apparatus improvises in an erratic manner, unfettered by accountability mechanisms. The regime does not necessarily pull the levers of hard control mechanisms-the tanks, guns, and tear gas-whenever dissenters cross a line of political acceptability. Instead, in keeping with its decentralized political system and its tradition of experimental policy-making, the Chinese state continually remakes the rules of the game which keeps potential rabble-rousers on their toes. Although the regulatory skeleton of state corporatism remains intact, flexible repression is the informal institution-the set of rules and procedures-that structures state-civil society interactions. Specifically, this institution is made up of three key practices: a) decentralization b) ad-hoc deployment c) mixed control strategies. These three practices manifest in two concrete strategies used to govern aboveground and underground civil society: fragmented coercion and controlled competition. Flexible repression enables the Chinese party-state to exploit the advantages of a flourishing third sector while curtailing its threatening potential. Through participant observation, interviews, and comparative case studies of aboveground and underground independent labor organizations, this dissertation accomplishes three goals. First, it identifies the within-country variation in state control strategies over civil society, which includes the above-ground sector as well as the underground sector of ostensibly banned organizations. Secondly, it traces the patterns of interactions between the state and civil society, generating hypotheses about the mechanisms of change. Finally, it identifies new concepts relevant for studying organized contention in authoritarian regime.. .... Overall, this dissertation contributes to the study of authoritarian state control and civil society contention, with an emphasis on the nexus between the two.

This article provides an overview of Internet shutdowns in Pakistan, which have become an increasingly common phenomenon, with 41 occurring between 2012 and 2017. It argues that to understand how shutdowns became normalized in Pakistan, it is necessary to look at the specific dynamics of how the shutdowns take place. In doing so, the concept of communicative ruptures develops to better understand intentional government shutdowns of communications. The article argues that strategic prevention of mobilization is key for short-term shutdowns, whereas long-term shutdowns can be better explained by looking at disciplinary mechanisms and denying the existence of "others". The article then discusses Internet shutdowns in the wider context of authoritarian practices before concluding with the urgent need for further research on this topic, both in Pakistan and beyond.