Lawmaking under Authoritarianism

Why are legislatures in some authoritarian regimes more powerful than others? Why does influence on policies and politics vary across dictatorships? To answer these questions, Lawmaking under Authoritarianism extends the power-sharing theory of authoritarian government to argue that autocracies with balanced factional politics have more influential legislatures than regimes with unbalanced or unstable factional politics. Where factional politics is balanced, autocracies have reviser legislatures that amend and reject significant shares of executive initiatives and are able to block or reverse policies preferred by dictators. When factional politics is unbalanced, notary legislatures may amend executive bills but rarely reject them, and regimes with unstable factional politics oscillate between these two extremes. Lawmaking under Authoritarianism employs novel datasets based on extensive archival research to support these findings, including strong qualitative case studies for past dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, and Spain.

Author Biography

Alejandro Bonvecchi is Professor of Political Science at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella. He is also an Independent Researcher at the National Council of Scientific and Technical Research (CONICET). His work focuses on the political economy of decision-making in legislatures and executives about economic and social policies. Emilia Simison is Lecturer in Latin American Politics at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on the comparative political economy of policymaking and policy change under both authoritarian and democratic regimes.