Parliaments Under Fire: Explaining Legislative Closures

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Why do political leaders in non-democracies close down legislatures? Recent political science research has analysed the creation and operation of legislatures in authoritarian states. Starting from seminal works by Jennifer Gandhi (2008) and Milan Svolik (2012), research has shifted to more fine-grained analyses of particular legislatures and their functioning, with recent books including work on China (Hou, 2019; Truex, 2016) and Kenya and Zambia (Opalo, 2019), as well as a special issue in Comparative Political Studies with research on China, Russia, and Vietnam (Gandhi, Noble, and Svolik, 2020; Lü, Liu, and Li, 2020; Noble, 2020; Schuler, 2020; Truex, 2020). But we still know surprisingly little about moments of parliamentary shutdown. This is a significant gap in knowledge, given what moments of closure can tell us about at least three key things: 1) how non-democratic elites are structured and what happens when this structure breaks down; 2) variation in processes and outcomes across different authoritarian regimes; and 3) how closure can affect subsequent political behaviour. Recent developments in Venezuela regarding President Nicolás Maduro’s attempts to use the Supreme Court to strip the Venezuelan National Assembly of its powers demonstrate that legislative closure is not a thing of the past. And the unlawful prorogation of Parliament in the United Kingdom demonstrates that legislative closure is not restricted to non-democracies.

This panel presents work produced by a newly formed early-career network of political scientists with different regional expertise, formed as part of the ‘Parliaments Under Fire’ project funded by the British Academy and led by Ben Noble (UCL). The goal is to realise the synergies of pooling deep country knowledge from different regions of the world, allowing for a nuanced appreciation of general dynamics, as well as regional and temporal differences. The first co-authored paper provides a sophisticated conceptual discussion of what, in fact, we mean by ‘legislative closure’, before noting the worrying shallowness of existing data on, and scholarship about, parliamentary shutdowns around the world. Drawing on the expertise of the network members, the paper proposes a recoding of variables relating to closure in both the V-Dem and the Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland datasets. The three other papers on the panel use the conceptual groundwork provided in the first paper to examine moments of closure in three regions: the Middle East and North Africa; Central Asia; and Southeast Asia. Allison Spencer Hartnett examines information on parliamentary careers in Jordan – using a new dataset of biographical characteristics of all Jordanian parliamentarians, 1933-2019 – to assess which features of MPs appear to make them invulnerable to being purged across moments of legislative closure. This novel approach gives an insight into regimes’ elite management strategies and how this maps onto the role of the legislature. Margaret Hanson explores how post-Soviet dictators in Central Asia sought to transform parliamentary institutions inherited from the Soviet era from threats into tools. Examining the cases of Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan using comparative historical analysis, the paper provides an insight into how aspiring autocrats become entrenched dictators. Finally, the paper by Lee Morgenbesser and Ben Noble focuses on distinct pathways leading to moments of legislative closure in the Philippines (1973), Cambodia (1976), Myanmar (1990), and Thailand (2014). By focusing on different routes leading to shutdown, the paper highlights the reality of equifinality and the chimerical nature of searching for a ‘unified model’ of non-democratic legislative politics in general and closure in particular. The chair and discussants are leading scholars in the field. The chair, Jennifer Gandhi (Emory), and one of the discussants, Milan Svolik (Yale), have both been pathbreakers in the study of authoritarian legislatures. The second discussant, Pauline Jones (University of Michigan), has produced pioneering work in the study of institutions across a wide range of regional settings, including the former Soviet Union, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East and North Africa.

Overall, therefore, this panel aims to tackle key issues noted in the ‘Democracy & Autocracy’ Division Call, with its mention of the 'role of institutions', 'themes pertinent to political change', 'when [...] democratic nations turn away from core principles', and work focusing 'on different world regions'. The panel also exhibits diversity, consisting of scholars working in the US, the UK, and Australia, as well as at different academic ranks, from postdoctoral fellow through to full professor. This panel aims to present state-of-the-art work and set the agenda for the next stage in the study of authoritarian legislatures.

Sub Unit

• Division 44: Democracy and Autocracy

Individual Presentations

• Parliaments Under Fire: Conceptualizing and Operationalizing Legislative Closure - Benjamin Harry Noble, University College London; Lindsay J. Benstead, Portland State University; Michaela Collord, University of Oxford; Margaret Hanson, Arizona State University; Allison Spencer Hartnett, University of Southern California; Lee Morgenbesser, Griffith University; Paul J. Schuler, University of Arizona; Matthew Charles Wilson, University of South Carolina; Josef Woldense, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

• Parliamentary Resistance and Authoritarian Consolidation in Central Asia - Margaret Hanson, Arizona State University

• Legislative Closure and Careers in Autocracies: Evidence from Jordan - Allison Spencer Hartnett, University of Southern California

Chair

• Jennifer Gandhi Emory University

Discussants

• Milan Svolik Yale University

• Pauline Jones University of Michigan