Strength in Numbers: How Variation in Party Size Impacts the Origins, Evolution, and Durability of Communist Regimes

This article proceeds from a novel empirical finding: namely, there is substantial divergence in the size of the communist party between two subtypes of communist autocracies (revolutionary vs. nonrevolutionary regimes). The communist party is small at the moment of the seizure of power in the revolutionary dictatorships (e.g., China) and remains relatively small throughout their lifespan. By contrast, in the nonrevolutionary subtype (e.g., Bulgaria) the communist party is large at the time of regime inception and remains so throughout the lifespan of the dictatorship. The article identifies the precommunist historical antecedents of this variation and offers an explanation of its effects, linking the divergence in party size to variation in outcomes of central theoretical interest to students of authoritarianism, such as regime origins, regime evolution, and regime durability. The article is based on an original communist party dataset constructed from qualitative corpora of archival materials, supplemented with relevant secondary sources.