Democratic Backsliding on the Legislative Floor: Evidence from Zambia

• In Event: Elections, Parties, and Representation in Non-Western Democracies

Abstract

How does democratic backsliding affect the behavior of incumbent party and opposition legislators? We investigate this question in Zambia, an emerging democracy that has experienced varying levels of democratic turmoil and stability over the last few decades. Using computational text analysis on a corpus of approximately 390,000 speaking turns across 1,292 parliamentary sessions from 2001-2021, we analyze how legislative debates between incumbent and opposition players evolved during the Presidency of Edgar Lungu. We show that Lungu's increasingly authoritarian leadership style during his second term in office had negative consequences for the nature of democratic speech in parliament. We find a substantial reduction in the participation of opposition legislators in parliamentary debates as well as a decrease in the likelihood that constituency-level issue priorities are brought to the floor for discussion. We also document that this period is associated with a negative turn in the emotional valence of debates, including negative speech-making and more disruptive interruptions against the opposition. Our findings suggest how democratic backsliding manifests in the legislative arena, which has implications for democratic discourse and representation of constituent interests.

Authors

• Donghyun Danny Choi, Brown University

• Fiona Shen-Bayh, University of Maryland, College Park