Incentives for Constituency Service in an Authoritarian Legislature

• In Event: Authoritarian Legislatures

Abstract

Contrary to the belief that legislatures in authoritarian regimes are purely ceremonial, recent advances in the literature show that they are sites of contestation. So far, only a handful of authoritarian legislatures have been studied in light of this finding and even fewer leverage data on the observed behavior of each individual member. As a novel case in point, members of the National Assembly of Zambia (NAZ) are unlikely to achieve policy changes without the president’s approval, but this does not keep them from pursuing political goals within the institution. Upon taking the floor in parliamentary debates, the politicians regularly address issues that are specific to their own constituency urging the national government to attend to local issues. There is significant variation in how frequently politicians from the different groupings in parliament resort to this constituency service strategy; most markedly, the opposition does more constituency service in debates than incumbents. I come to this conclusion by using an original measure of constituency service constructed with a text-as-data dictionary approach to transcripts of parliamentary proceedings in the NAZ from 2006 to 2021. The constituency service measure provides for meaningful theorizing of elite political behavior and holds potential for causal identification in the study of authoritarian legislatures.

Author

• Anton Mynster Kronborg, University of Oslo