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.本文基于一项全新的经验发现，即共产主义威权政体的两种亚型（革命型与非革命型政权，revolutionary vs. nonrevolutionary regimes）中，共产党的规模存在显著差异。革命型独裁政权（如中国）在夺取政权之际，共产党规模尚小，且在其整个执政周期内始终保持相对较小的体量。与之相对，非革命型亚型政权（如保加利亚）在政权创立之初，共产党规模便已庞大，并在整个独裁统治存续期间始终维持这一规模。本文厘清了该差异的前共产主义历史成因，并对其产生的效应作出阐释，将政党规模差异与威权主义研究学界高度关注的核心理论议题的研究结果相挂钩，具体涵盖政权起源、政权演化与政权存续性。本文依托一套原创性共产党数据集展开，该数据集基于档案材料的质性语料库构建，并辅以相关二手学术资料进行补充完善。