Pre-democratic organizational practices shaped successor parties’ post-regime survival capacities
Evidence
If the sources of these elite resources lie in previous authoritarian practices, these skills and usable pasts should reflect the variation in the organizational practices of the ancien regime. In the case of the communist successor parties, predemocratic organizational practices – internal policies of recruitment and advancement, policy reform, and negotiation with the opposition – influenced the elites’ degree of pragmatic orientation, their ability and will to centralize the parties, and their skill in responding to and communicating effectively with the public, respectively.
— Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past, 88
Categorization
XREF: Causal claim that authoritarian-era practices, not primordial identity or ideology, determine post-transition success — directly comparable to the reader’s manufactured-threat framework and to communist successor party trajectories post-1989. — connects to: Communist organizational legacies paradoxically enabled successor parties’ democratic survival; Discredited ancien regime parties can survive collapse and win power through regeneration — Anna M. Grzymala-Busse, Redeeming The Communist Past: The…, 46; Policy-innovation experience without implementation skill hampered successors in democratic competition (+17 more)