Lawmaking Under Authoritarianism

This workshop will discuss the draft book Lawmaking under Authoritarism, which argues that factional politics and power-sharing arrangements shape legislative institutions and their performance in autocracies, and shows how dictatorships backed by united and embedded factions have collective executives and relatively more powerful legislatures than those backed by less united and embedded factions, which have personalist executives and weaker legislatures. This one-day workshop brings together Kellogg Faculty and external experts to discuss the theoretical contributions and the empirical cases – Argentina, Brazil, Spain – from the manuscript. The workshop will contribute to debate of a central topic in the Institute’s scholarly agenda: the institutional similarities and differences between democracy and autocracy, and the legacies that regime changes may carry. Debate on these topics is particularly timely as autocratization rises and dictatorships become central players in the global arena.

The workshop is organized in two sessions, separated by a lunch break. The morning session will focus on the manuscript’s theoretical chapters, while the afternoon will concentrate on the empirical cases.