Democratic Erosion and Political Party Elites

The recession of democracies is on the rise. The result has been an increased focus by political scientists on when one can expect there to be resistance to a democracy's degradation. What remains unexplored is why, in some cases, incumbent political parties have deposed would-be autocrats within their ranks after they have been elected to high office. While such actions are not commonplace, ruling parties in South Africa, Sri Lanka, Bolivia and Ecuador have removed, or contributed to the removal of, incumbent leaders who took steps to erode their democracies. As yet, no theory has been developed to explain these cases. All contemporary models assume that the citizen's preferences and actions determine the direct constraints on an incumbent's ability to undermine democracy. I instead place the focus on the would-be autocrat's own party in order to determine the conditions under which party elites would halt their incumbent's anti-democratic actions. To fill this gap, I propose a two models which together provide some insight into the strategic behavior of an incumbent would-be autocrat and the party elite as actors. They illustrate the conditions under which political parties either depose or abandon incumbent leaders who undermine democracy. In the first model, I make clear that in order to a would-be autocrat to maintain the support of the ruling party elite when eroding democracy, the would-be autocrat must compensate the party elite. In the second model, I establish that the party elite will remove the incumbent president responsible to for undermining democracy if the median citizen expresses disapproval of anti-democratic actions of the president. These insights shed light on how an effective, yet infrequently used, gatekeeping method within political parties operates.