Legislatures and Regime Survival: Why Strong Authoritarian Institutions Help Democratization

This paper examines how authoritarian legislative institutions affect regime survival. I argue that authoritarian legislatures and party systems, even when devised to quell threats from authoritarian rivals, can influence the distribution of power in a subsequent democracy. When legislative institutions and party systems help protect the interests of authoritarian elites in new democracies, these institutions increase the likelihood of democratization. Accounting for selection and using a multinomial choice model on a data set of 200 authoritarian regimes in 108 countries from 1950 to 2002, I find that authoritarian legislatures decrease the probability of being replaced by a subsequent authoritarian regimes in all regime types, but increase the probability of democratization in military and single party regimes, and when the dictator does not have access to abundant natural resource rents. Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance, Princeton University. Prepared for “Dictatorships: Their Governance and Social Consequences” conference at Princeton University, April 25-26, 2008. I wish to thank Barbara Geddes for helpful comments on an earlier draft, and Michael Ross for sharing data on oil and gas rents. Recently, scholars have begun to look systematically at authoritarian political institutions such as parties, legislatures, and elections (Brownlee 2007, Boix 2003, Gandhi forthcoming, Gandhi & Przeworski 2007, Gandhi & Przeworski 2006, Geddes 2005, Geddes 1999, Smith 2005). In this article, I explore how authoritarian legislatures affect the survival of authoritarian regimes, distinguishing between two types of authoritarian failure: transition to a subsequent dictatorship and democratization. Legislative institutions in authoritarian regimes can help sustain the dictator in power by making the dictator’s promises to potential authoritarian rivals more credible. Accordingly, these institutions decrease the likelihood of being replaced by a rival dictator. However, I argue that legislative institutions and party systems can also affect the likelihood of democracy by influencing the distribution of power in a subsequent democracy. Relative to other types of regimes, party elites in dominant single party regimes with institutionalized party systems are much more likely to participate in and win competitive post-authoritarian elections, preserving some modicum of power for themselves in a new democracy. In military regimes, elites use institutionalized legislatures and party systems to guarantee their corporate interests are protected after a transition to democracy. In both cases, because authoritarian legislatures and party systems can guarantee at least some of the interests of the outgoing elites, these institutions make a transition to democracy more likely, all else equal. To test these expectations about how legislative institutions and party systems influence survival, I model both transitions to a subsequent dictatorship and transitions to a new democracy. The argument that authoritarian legislative institutions can help protect the interests of authoritarian elites in a subsequent democracy builds on some of the most influential research on comparative democratization in recent years (Acemoglu & Robinson 2001, 2006, Boix 2003, Robinson 2006). Building on the insights of the Meltzer-Richard model (1981),1 this literature posits that structural characteristics of the economy, such as income inequality or asset mobility, can deter taxation of the rich in a democracy. When relatively high equality or dependence on mobile assets constrain taxation of the rich in a democracy, elite interests are better protected and democratization is more likely. There are numerous cases of democratization, however, in countries with both high income inequality and low asset mobility – for example, the transitions from military rule in many Central American countries. To understand democratization in these countries, we might consider that military elites may not always view guarantees of modest taxation as the necessary condition for ceding power to democrats. Rather, their chief concern may be protecting the military’s corporate interests, such as securing ample military budgets and immunity from human rights prosecution. Insofar as authoritarian political institutions can influence the distribution of power in a post-authoritarian democracy to help protect these interests, these institutions can make democratization more likely. 1The implications of this model suggest that the (poor) median voter in a democracy should set a higher tax rate than rich elites in a dictatorship. Therefore, the rich should resist democracy because they face a higher tax rate under democracy.