It is often assumed that, even if opposition parties can participate in electoral politics, they are fragmented, insufficient and insignificant under authoritarian regimes in which the ruling elites have maintained their political power for the long term. Recently, however, there have been not a few pre-electoral coalitions in various countries in Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Post-Communist World and the Middle East that opposition parties have formed with each other during the parliamentary elections. Under what conditions do opposition parties form pre-electoral coalitions in multiparty authoritarian regimes?
There are still a few studies on pre-electoral coalitions under authoritarian regimes, though even such arguments have not consider a possibility that opposition parties could form them not only in competitive context but also in hegemonic one: In other words, these studies have treated a degree of party competitiveness as a given condition and dismissed a question of how it affects coalition formation among opposition parties. Therefore, this article focuses on party competition and electoral institutions, and attempts to testify their effects on the pre-electoral coalitions formed by the leading opposition parties by using an original data of the parliamentary elections from 1961 to 2008 in multiparty authoritarian regimes in which ruling elites have maintained their political power for more than a decade.
The first section outlines it as a background of pre-electoral coalition formation of opposition parties that the number of authoritarian regimes which adopted a multiparty system has dramatically increased since the 1990s. Although compelling to adopt a multiparty system as a part of political liberalization, ruling parties have still tended to maintain their economic, social and political dominance and the opposition parties have tended to be in a disadvantageous position: It is authoritarian single-party dominance.
The second section provides four hypotheses of pre-electoral coalitions focused on the party competition and the electoral institutions on the basis of two contrasting logics derived from the analyses of authoritarian regimes:One is that multiparty elections can facilitate their political liberalization, and another is that they can foster their political stability.
The third section testifies several models with a large-N logistic regression with a sample of 248 parliamentary elections in 54 countries in the period 1961-2008. These models show that the leading opposition party is more likely to form pre-electoral coalitions with other parties when (1) the opposition parties as a whole have more seat share and when (2) the Effective Number of Opposition Parties (ENOP) increase, but that it is less likely to do it when (3) the numbers of the interaction term of seat share and ENOP increase and when (4) the plurality voting system is adopted. Finally, this article concludes by emphasizing that political institutions matter in authoritarian regimes.