Canonical theories of legislative institutions in authoritarian regimes highlight the role of oppositions in legitimizing non-democratic rule, shaping the autocrat's policy agenda, and extracting concessions. Despite recent advances in understanding how oppositions shape larger, macro-level outcomes, surprisingly little attention has been given to the question of how legislators behave in office and how the regime manages potential opposition. In this paper, we construct a novel dataset of roll call vote records spanning the entirety of Kuwaiti legislative history---more than 150,000 votes over 53 years. We use this to develop a new method for measuring legislative opposition to and cooperation with an authoritarian regime on substantive policy issues. We then test the effectiveness of regime strategies---rents and policy concessions---for coopting potential opposition and examine the circumstances under which these these strategies are used.

Foundational political behavior scholarship posits that institutions of higher education foster the types of attitudes and patterns of civic engagement that sustain liberal democracy. Yet throughout the developing world, authoritarian, ethnosectarian, and clientelist political parties often intervene in university politics, particularly through competition in student elections. We argue this intervention limits the liberalizing effect of participation in university associational life. To test this argument, we measure the effect of political party intervention in university life using a panel survey experiment conducted at the American University of Beirut (AUB) during the university's annual student elections. Using a choice-based conjoint experiment embedded in a difference-in-differences design--the first of its kind--we estimate the causal effect of participation on non-partisan students. We find that processes of university socialization reproduce status quo politics and limit the ability of these environments to encourage critical, tolerant, and liberal-minded citizens.

Family socialization is a key mechanism for the transmission of political attitudes and behaviors. Work in developed democracies highlights the role of family socialization in the stability of partisanship across generations. But what of family socialization in new democracies? In this paper, we develop a framework for understanding how experiences with state repression and the process of family socialization influence new democracies after transition from authoritarian rule. In doing so, we combine findings from established literature on processes of family socialization with political psychological work on how repression crystallizes political identities. We examine how individual-level experiences of state repression shape political participation and partisanship in Tunisia, an important and rare contemporary case of successful (and still ongoing) democratic transition. Drawing on a nationally representative survey conducted in 2017, we find evidence that Tunisian citizens whose family and community members who were arrested are more likely to vote in subsequent democratic elections and to vote against the old regime. While individuals who were arrested under the previous authoritarian regime are less likely to turn out to vote, in line with research on the demobilizing effects of repression, those that do vote are strong partisans and are more likely to vote for the former opposition and anti-old regime parties. This paper lays out a broader project on how the different socialization processes in authoritarian regimes affect political attitudes and behaviors after democratization.