The literature on democratization has experienced radical mood swings in recent decades, from extreme optimism in the 1990s to extreme pessimism today. These mood swings have resulted in not only misguided claims about the state of democracy in the world but also a muddied understanding of what drives both democratization and democratic erosion.

The Argentine (Peronist) Justicialista Party (PJ) underwent a far-reaching coalitional transformation during the 1980s and 1990s. Party reformers dismantled Peronism's traditional mechanisms of labor participation, and clientelist networks replaced unions as the primary linkage to the working and lower classes. By the early 1990s, the PJ had transformed from a labor-dominated party into a machine party in which unions were relatively marginal actors. This process of de-unionization was critical to the PJ's electoral and policy success during the presidency of Carlos Menem (1989–99). The erosion of union influence facilitated efforts to attract middle-class votes and eliminated a key source of internal opposition to the government's economic reforms. At the same time, the consolidation of clientelist networks helped the PJ maintain its traditional working- and lower-class base in a context of economic crisis and neoliberal reform. This article argues that Peronism's radical de-unionization was facilitated by the weakly institutionalized nature of its traditional party-union linkage. Although unions dominated the PJ in the early 1980s, the rules of the game governing their participation were always informal, fluid, and contested, leaving them vulnerable to internal changes in the distribution of power. Such a change occurred during the 1980s, when office-holding politicians used patronage resources to challenge labor's privileged position in the party. When these politicians gained control of the party in 1987, Peronism's weakly institutionalized mechanisms of union participation collapsed, paving the way for the consolidation of machine politics—and a steep decline in union influence—during the 1990s.

This article explores the causes of authoritarian durability. Why do some authoritarian regimes survive for decades, often despite severe crises, while others collapse quickly, even absent significant challenges? Based on an analysis of all authoritarian regimes between 1900 and 2015, the authors argue that regimes founded in violent social revolution are especially durable. Revolutionary regimes, such as those in Russia, China, Cuba, and Vietnam, endured for more than half a century in the face of strong external pressure, poor economic performance, and large-scale policy failures. The authors develop and test a theory that accounts for such durability using a novel data set of revolutionary regimes since 1900. The authors contend that autocracies that emerge out of violent social revolution tend to confront extraordinary military threats, which lead to the development of cohesive ruling parties and powerful and loyal security apparatuses, as well as to the destruction of alternative power centers. These characteristics account for revolutionary regimes’ unusual longevity.