ICS Working Papers Nº2/2016

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ICS WORKING PAPERS 2016
single or dominant parties that would become the dominant political institutions in these new
regimes.
Some of these parties represent an interesting example of party formation within an
authoritarian context. Genetically, they are parties created ‘from above’ that sought to
monopolize political representation and channel and neutralize the large and contradictory
bloc supporting the dictatorship. They were a variant of ‘unified parties’, representing ‘the
fusion from above of a new political entity’ that forces existing conservative political groups
to integrate or be excluded The founding agreement may, to varying degrees, include
existing parties or pressure groups. This is particularly important when elections and other
forms of constitutional representation are still in use, even if in a limited way, as was the case
in Hungary and Poland. Such parties generally lack a representational monopoly and co-exist
with other ‘organic’ political institutions over which they have no control and have a party
apparatus with limited independence from the government and administration. The absence
of a codified ideology is also a product of their being a post facto creation. In some
dictatorships, where corporatism became an important element of the official ideology – as in
Salazar’s Portugal – the single party was defined as the ‘national corporation of politics’
and the names of these parties symbols of the organic-statist projects of the dictatorships:
the Primo de Rivera’s Patriotic Union, Salazar’s National Union, the Hungarian Party of
National Unity and the Polish National Unity Camp. The failed attempts at creating royal
dictatorships in Romania (Party of the Nation) and Yugoslavia (Yugoslav National Party) were
examples of the same pattern. Regardless of their origins though (whether predating the
dictatorship or created from above following the breakdown of the previous regime) or their
nature (whether mass or elite parties) they performed similar roles in the new political
system by providing an institutionalized interaction between the dictator and his allies and
political control over corporatist institutions in the majority of inter-war dictatorships.
Corporatist theorists may have diverged in terms of organic political representation, but
contextual factors were central to the design of new forms of representation. The ideology of
the corporatist state as a state based on functional rather than individual forms of
representation was perhaps most powerful in the authoritarian sectors of the right in inter-
war Europe: nevertheless, its implementation in the dictatorships was incomplete and much
less universal. Despite the primacy of social corporatism, the constitution of organic political
representation as an alternative to parliamentary democracy also plays a central role in the
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