Legislative Institutions and Performance in Authoritarian Regimes

This project studies the institutional design of legislatures in authoritarian regimes and its effects on legislative performance. This topic is both scholarly and policy relevant. Authoritarianism rules over about 40% of the world's population (Geddes et al. 2018), so improving understanding of how it works may contribute both to theory and practice of democratization, and to international relations between democracies and autocracies. Authoritarian institutions may also shape successor democratic regimes (Mainwaring and Pérez-Liñán 2014), so understanding how legislatures were designed and operated therein may help identify institutional mechanisms that serve to constrain authoritarian-minded executives regardless of regime type. The project argues that regimes concentrating executive power in one person generally limit power-sharing to providing voice to coalition members, and thus organize legislatures with little to no agenda and/or policymaking powers, or no legislature at all; whereas regimes distributing executive power within a collective body generally share power more extensively, so they would organize legislatures with comparatively stronger agenda and/or policymaking powers. It tests these arguments by studying the organization and performance of three legislatures in authoritarian regimes: the Comisión de Asesoramiento Legislativo (CAL) under Argentina's last military dictatorship; the Cortes Españolas under the Franco regime; and the Brazilian Congress under the military regime. Preliminary results on the Argentine and Spanish cases support the hypotheses: while the Cortes under Franco's personal dictatorship rarely rejected government bills, the CAL under the collective dictatorship of the Armed Forces rejected a significant share; and in both legislatures the opposing factions in the regime amended each other's bills. The aims for the Visiting Fellowship are to expand the argument to the Brazilian case, refine the theory by linking it to the variety of democratic and non-democratic political regimes, and complete a piece on business influence on economic legislation, and a draft book manuscript on the three cases.