Change and Democratization in One-Party Systems

Abstract

This analysis of one-party systems in three different settings — the American South, the Eastern Bloc, and the Third World - ponders the circumstance that both interparty competition and intraparty competition among subparty components (organization, office, and electorate) are on the rise in all three settings. This bodes well for the chances of democracy in each setting, regardless of whether one expects to find democracy in between the parties, as Schattschneider did, or expects that democracy should order the parties internally, as classical democratic theorists do. The analysis also commends Southern leadership succession institutions (competitive primaries and run-offs) as devices for attaining democracy while still in the one-party mode, and credits broader, pervasive structural and politocultural features of the American polity for the workability of those institutions.