The Ideocratic Trap: Communist Regimes and the Structural Pattern of Elite Cohesion

Why do communist regimes survive significantly longer than other one-party autocracies despite sharing similar organizational features? Standard accounts attribute this durability to party structures while rarely operationalizing ideology as an independent binding mechanism. Drawing on the Varieties of Political Regimes (Va-PoReg) dataset (1900-present), this paper demonstrates that communist resilience stems from an ideocratic logic that generates elite entrapment through structural constraints. The binding mechanism operates through two reinforcing pathways. First, participation in transformative violence (collectivization, purges, mass repression) creates shared culpability that structurally raises exit costs: successor regimes classify these acts as crimes rather than policy errors, making credible repositioning as democrats structurally implausible. This logic persists across generations as post-revolutionary elites bear responsibility for system maintenance under party monopoly. Second, ideological vetting and institutional penetration of armed forces through political commissars prevent the military from developing the corporate autonomy necessary for coup coordination, explaining the absence of successful military interventions in communist regimes. Using Va-PoReg combined with comparative analysis of regime trajectories, the paper demonstrates that durability depends on how deeply ideocratic logic penetrates state institutions. Regimes emerging from protracted revolutionary struggle (China, Vietnam, Cuba) embedded this logic through indigenous mobilization, achieving maximum elite cohesion. Soviet-imposed Eastern European regimes collapsed not merely because external guarantees disappeared, but because ideocratic penetration remained shallow: party control over militaries was formal rather than internalized, and elites lacked the culpability structures binding their Asian counterparts. Legitimation patterns condition the efficacy of organizational forms: identical party structures generate vastly different binding effects depending on whether authority rests on claims of historical necessity or pragmatic coordination.