All political parties rely on citizens to serve as candidates that run for office and activists that mobilize voters; however, because opposition parties in dominant party systems are resource-poor, they rise or fall based on their ability to attract volunteers to fill these posts. But if prospective candidates and national-level activists (a group I refer to collectively as party elites or elite activists) know that challenger parties are at a competitive disadvantage, why would they join them instead of joining the dominant party or simply abstaining? How do changes in the competitive environment, such as decreases in the dominant party's resource advantages and its use of repression, affect the profile of citizens willing to join a challenger?

This brief chapter addresses these questions by supplying a theory of elite activist party affiliation that is appropriate for studying dominant party systems. My concern here is not with the visionaries or charismatics that form parties, but with the candidates and activists who decide to support them and thus provide fuel for the entrepreneur's spark. The affiliation model takes for granted that a founder has formed an opposition party and that prospective party elites know that the dominant party benefits from hyper-incumbency advantages, thus distorting competitive dynamics as depicted in Chapter 2. The payoff for constructing a separate model of party affiliation is that it allows us to generate very specific hypotheses about the sincere policy preferences of party elites that the challenger can attract as political conditions change.