Felix Wiebrecht, PhD Candidate in the Department of Government and Public Administration at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, summarises his recently published study on the notable differences in strength of legislatures in authoritarian regimes.
Barbara Geddes famously stated that “different kinds of authoritarianism differ from each other as much as they differ from democracy” and the same is true for their legislatures. From country-specific case studies we know that some of them neatly fit into the long-dominating narrative of authoritarian legislatures being merely of a ceremonial nature and nothing more than ‘rubberstamps’. Examples of this would include the parliaments of Belarus, Turkmenistan, Sudan, and in one of the most extreme cases that of North Korea.
Other parliaments, however, enjoy a wider range of powers, at least in the constitution if not necessarily in practice such as the Vietnamese National Assembly or the Grand National Assembly in Turkey’s past authoritarian periods. Among the de facto powers, the Parliament of Singapore is an example that fulfils a lot of the important functions of being able to remove the Head of State or investigate the executive independently. Prior research, such as the Parliamentary Powers Index (PPI) developed by Fish and Kroenig, provides evidence that, perhaps not surprisingly, legislatures in democracies tend to be more powerful when compared to those in authoritarian regimes. But how do we make sense of the great variance of legislative strength, i.e., the accumulation (or absence) of different powers of legislatures vis-à-vis the executive, across authoritarian regimes?
I find that across authoritarian regimes the level of democracy is also a highly significant but relatively weak predictor of how strong legislatures are. Three other factors are more pronouncedly linked to legislative strength, namely whether the regime is headed by a personalist dictator, whether it holds elections and whether an opposition is represented in the legislature.
Not all dictators are personalist leaders, i.e., those that control “access to key political posts, as well as most major policy decisions” (Frantz, 2018:76) such as Mao Zedong, Alexander Lukashenko or Muammar Gaddafi that face almost no constrains in their rule from regime insiders or outsiders. However, the closer an authoritarian leader comes to this ‘ideal-type’ of a dictator, the weaker the legislature tends to be.
However, when authoritarian regimes allow an opposition in parliament and when they hold elections, they also have stronger legislatures on average. In the tradition of literature on authoritarian regimes this can be seen as the manifestation of the cooptation mechanism. Most prominently put forward by Jennifer Gandhi, cooptation denotes that once a dictator feels threatened by the opposition that aims to overthrow him, he can establish institutions such as legislatures and invite the opposition to participate in governing the country through the legislature. Indeed, these institutions have to be stronger since otherwise the opposition may not agree to work through them and instead try to overthrow the dictator.
While these factors would suggest that when a dictator has to give up some control the legislatures also become stronger, there is a caveat to that. I find that before 1990 legislatures have often been used as ‘bargaining chips’ by dictators. It appears that it was a popular strategy to weaken legislatures whenever elections were reformed to be more open and competitive. In this way, dictators could afford to have less control over the elections, simply because the stakes, that is, the strength of the legislature, were lower.
After the Cold War, however, the nature of many authoritarian regimes has changed fundamentally. We are currently in the era of ‘competitive authoritarianism’ in which most authoritarian regimes have legislatures and allow some opposition parties to participate in elections. In this background, more competitive or liberalizing elements in the electoral and legislative processes are indeed associated with stronger legislatures after 1990. This is in line with recent research on legislatures in Africa that highlight that less dictatorial meddling in legislative processes is an important condition for legislative development. Legislative strength has not been a widely used concept regarding authoritarian legislatures. However, as we move to understand their roles in authoritarian governance in more depth, it may be useful to pursue more research investigating the effects of legislative strength. It helps us differentiate between ‘pure’ rubberstamps and those that are stronger vis-à-vis the dictator.
Felix Wiebrecht, PhD Candidate in the Department of Government and Public Administration at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, @FelixWiebrecht
