The Strength to Concede: Ruling Parties and Democratization in Developmental Asia Dan Slater and Joseph Wong Authoritarian ruling parties are expected to be exceptionally resistant to democratization. Yet some of the strongest authoritarian parties in the world have not resisted democratization, but have embraced it. This is because their raison d’etre is to continue ruling, not necessarily to remain authoritarian. Democratization requires that ruling parties hold free and fair elections, but not that they lose them. Authoritarian ruling parties can thus be incentivized to concede democratization from a position of exceptional strength as well as extreme weakness. This “conceding-to-thrive” scenario is most likely to unfold when regimes (1) possess substantial ante- cedent political strengths and resource advantages, (2) suffer ominous setbacks signaling that they have passed their apex of domi- nation, and (3) pursue new legitimation strategies to arrest their incipient decline. We illustrate this heretofore neglected alternative democratization pathway through a comparative-historical analysis of three Asian developmental states where ruling parties have democratized from varying positions of considerable strength:Taiwan, South Korea, and Indonesia. We then consider the impli- cations of our analysis for three “candidate cases” in developmental Asia where ruling parties have not yet conceded democratization despite being well-positioned to thrive were they to do so: Singapore, Malaysia, and the world’s most populous dictatorship, China. I t has been widely argued and empirically well- established that ruling parties help sustain authoritarian regimes. Explanations for why this is so center either on ruling parties’ distinctive capacities or their incentives. The most influential incentive-centered work theorizes that party cadres possess especially strong motives to cling to power. “The preferences of party cadres are much simpler than those of [military] officers,” Geddes persuasively argues. “Like democratic politicians, they simply want to hold office.” 1 Party cadres are more resistant to surrender- ing political office than military officers because they have no barracks to which they can safely retreat. Ruling par- ties thus ensure that dictatorships will exhibit an espe- cially iron will to power. Yet the implications of this discussion for the likeli- hood of democratization in party-led regimes have not been adequately appreciated or explored. Critically, it implies that the raison d’etre of authoritarian ruling par- ties is to continue ruling, but not necessarily to remain authoritarian. For ruling militaries, withdrawal from office is necessary for democratization to occur. Yet ruling parties can democratize without losing office. For authoritarian par- ties, democratization entails the concession to hold free Dan Slater is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Chicago (slater@uchicago.edu). Joseph Wong is Canada Research Chair and Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, where he is also the Director of the Asian Institute at the Munk School of Global Affairs (joe.wong@utoronto.ca). The authors would like to thank Jeff Isaac, the anonymous reviewers at Perspectives on Politics, and all of those who provided critical and con- structive feedback on earlier versions of this paper presented at the Midwest Political Science Association, the University of Toronto, University of Chicago, Oxford University, University of Michigan, University of Washington, Austra- lian National University, UCLA, National Taiwan University, Fudan University, and McGill University. Although more individuals have provided feedback than we can mention (or perhaps even remember) here, we would especially like to acknowledge the detailed comments offered by colleagues from our home departments at the University of Chicago (Michael Albertus, Milena Ang, Jose Antonio Hernandez Company, Mark Deming, Sofia Fenner, Juan Fernando Ibarra del Cueto, Junyan Jiang, Cheol-sung Lee, Yeonju Lee, Stanislav Markus, Aditi Rajeev, Alberto Simp- ser, Paul Staniland, and Mariela Szwarcberg) and the University of Toronto (Lynette Ong, Victor Falkenheim, Wendy Wong, Edward Schatz, Antoinette Handley, Jeffrey Kopstein, Kanta Murali, and Lilach Gilady). Our thanks also go to Manuel Viedma for his assistance and collabora- tion on data collection beyond our original Asian cases. Articles doi:10.1017/S1537592713002090 © American Political Science Association 2013 September 2013 | Vol. 11/No. 3 717