Designing the Rules of the Game: Legislative Procedures in Authoritarian States

• In Event: Autocratic Decision-Making

Abstract

While dictators reduce threats from the opposition by sharing legislative power, such a strategy runs the risk of producing policies counter to dictators’ policy preferences. How do dictators manage the tradeoff? While previous scholars suppose that benefits of sharing legislative power outweigh whatever costs the dictators pay, those costs have not been clearly articulated. How big are policy losses associated with sharing legislative power, and how-if at all-can dictators avoid them? In this paper, I engage these issues directly by identifying variation in legislative procedures. Dictators institute procedures to provide venues for the opposition to participate, but they also simultaneously institute procedures to protect their important policies. Combining a different set of procedures creates various configurations. I analyze the configurations with formal models, and show a counterintuitive finding: legislative processes where the opposition exercises some institutional roles produce similar policies as those produced via processes where dictators monopolize legislative power. This paper sheds light on how dictators manage policy costs while retaining the benefit of sharing legislative powers

Author

• Ae sil Woo, University of California, Merced