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Introduction
Dominant party systems were once considered to be highly durable. In an influential survey of democratic regimes with such 'uncommon' party systems, Pempel (1990) predicted that the ruling parties in Italy, Japan, and Sweden would likely remain in power for the foreseeable future. Looking at authoritarian regimes in transition, Haggard and Kaufman (1995) examined the cases of Mexico and Taiwan in the early 1990s, concluding that dominant parties have distinct capacities to adjust their policies without diminishing their political power. However, the past two decades have seen remarkable changes in the political landscape, with many ruling parties either losing their grip or completely disappearing from the electoral map.
These events were important in their own right, since they drastically changed the structure of the party system and brought substantial political competition. However, they also pose a theoretical challenge for political scientists. What were the causes of the demise of dominant parties that have kept such a firm grip on their countries? So far, few researchers have explored this question beyond examining particular cases.
In order to tackle this question of party system change, we begin with an overview of dominant party systems in the postwar world. Examining the choices of voters and ruling elites, we find that most dominant parties have experienced major splits before they fell from power. In many of these cases, the defection of important party factions or powerful politicians either directly caused electoral turnover, or became a catalyst for further changes towards a more competitive party system. If these splits had not occurred, the dominant parties are likely to have survived much longer.
These findings suggest that we should pay more attention to intraparty politics in order to explain the collapse of dominant party systems. Previous works have provided a number of reasons why ruling parties lose their dominant position as a result of interparty competition, but have had relatively little to say about the conflicts that occur within those parties. Especially, the literature leaves two important theoretical puzzles unresolved: why party members ever decide to defect from electorally 'dominant' parties, and why leaders fail to buy off those dissidents in order to stay in power. We address these problems by analyzing simple...