Cooptation in Practice: Measuring Legislative Opposition in an Authoritarian Regime

Abstract

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.

Respect the Process: The Public Cost of Unilateral Action in Comparative Perspective

“…Finally, the results speak to the question of what institutions like legislatures do in authoritarian regimes. Most of this literature argues that legislatures help dictators to keep elites and the public loyal by distributing rents, granting limited policy representation, and gathering information (Blaydes 2011;Gandhi 2008;Lust-Okar 2006;Tavana and York 2020;Truex 2016;Woo and Conrad 2019;Wright 2008). Less attention has been given to how citizens in authoritarian political systems perceive the policy process, and whether they prefer this process to be governed by certain institutional arrangements over others (Williamson and Magaloni 2020).…”

Political Control

“…When the opposition wins seats in elections and serves in government, it participates in a legislature that is essentially a rubber stamp (Brancati 2014, Moustafa 2014) and in doing so lends legitimacy to the state. Here, compliance manifests as cooperation: the co-opted opposition participate in supporting the state by overwhelmingly voting in favor of the state's policy agenda (Tavana & York 2020). Co-optation of rival elites works similarly, though here compliance manifests not only as cooperation but also as inaction.…”