The Fallen Whig: The Durability of Dominant Party Rule in Liberia

Abstract

How did a dominant party regime run by manumitted slaves from the USA emerge in Liberia at the height of the 19th century “Scramble for Africa,” nearly 40 years before the Bolshevik Revolution established a supposed template for durable one-party systems? What tools did the members of Liberia’s ruling True Whig Party (TWP) use to create the world’s longest-lived dominant party regime? Although scholars of authoritarianism have long sought to explain the durability of dominant party regimes such as the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, Liberia’s TWP has eluded all previous efforts. My research contributes to this literature by positing a novel explanation for Liberia’s dominant party regime’s durability. Using Gershewski’s Three Pillars of Authoritarianism (legitimation, co-optation, and repression), I argue that the 19th century colonial environment created conditions that pressured Liberia’s various settler factions to construct a dominant party regime, the TWP, to avoid state death. Once created, the regime survived by leveraging legitimation, co-optation, and repression to secure elite and mass level cooperation as well as international acceptance. Rather than centering my analysis on a single element of the three pillars of authoritarian stability as has been the convention in the literature, my research offers the first glimpse of a dominant party’s strategic application of all three pillars, thereby enriching our understanding of how these regimes work.