Abstract/Description

Often, scholars of party politics focus on specific types of party-building activities such as recruitment of members from home constituencies, territorial expansion through branches, and professional electoral campaigns. However, when the opposition faces political repression in the form of exile, spying, and censorship, it allocates fewer resources to mass party-building and concentrates more on defensive strategies such as secret recruitment, the formation of underground cells, and operating in exile. I hypothesize that defensive strategies are likely to impede the formation of the mass-mobilizing party machinery and reduce the chances for democratic consolidation. Specifically, I analyze the party-building activities of the Young Turks (1889-1908) who established the first organized opposition in the Ottoman Empire, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). To examine the causal effect of political repression, I exploit a natural experiment in which an exogenous European intervention in Ottoman Macedonia (provinces of Kosovo, Monastir, and Salonica) gradually ended Ottoman rule and rendered Sultan Abdülhamid’s political repression ineffective between 1903–1908. The intervention created a more liberal setting where the CUP activists built a mass-mobilizing party machinery and successfully executed the 1908 Constitutional Revolution.