Ruling party strength is often associated with positive outcomes in autocracies, but we know little about how the effects of party strength differ across party types or which feature of party organization contributes most to better outcomes. This article argues that party infrastructural strength – the ability of grassroots party organizations to penetrate society and mobilize the masses – improves governance outcomes but only for authoritarian parties that rose to power through social movements that overthrew the existing political system. Parties that relied on mass mobilization to gain power tend to continue utilizing party strength to provide public goods and gather support. I provide empirical support for my theory using data covering all autocratic ruling parties during the post-Second World War period. The findings have major implications for understanding the intellectual and political challenges posed by well-organized one-party regimes.

A key finding in the literature on authoritarian regimes is that leaders frequently rely on ruling parties to stay in power, but the field lacks systematic ways to measure autocratic party strength. As a result, it is not clear how often ruling parties are actually strong and capable of carrying out important functions. This article demonstrates that strong ruling parties are much rarer than is typically assumed. Using a global sample of dictatorships from 1946–2008, the author shows that most ruling parties are unable to survive the death or departure of the founding leader. This is true even of many ruling parties that have been coded as leading single-party regimes. While strong parties may be key to durable authoritarianism, relatively few parties are truly strong.

A commonly proffered theory to explain the use of elections in authoritarian regimes is that they help identify talented young leaders who can be groomed for leadership positions. Unfortunately, due to the difficulties of obtaining data in authoritarian settings, this hypothesis has not been tested satisfactorily. We examine candidate-level data from the 2007 Vietnamese National Assembly (VNA) election and subsequent selection of candidates for top positions within the VNA and for top ministry positions. We find no evidence that vote share is associated with promotion to leadership positions in the VNA and only limited evidence for vote share association with ministerial posts. Instead, the results indicate that leadership selection takes place within the party rather than through elections. Furthermore, behavior within the assembly suggests that those who were chosen may have been selected based on their loyalty or at least pliancy to the party elites.