Cosponsorship and Collective Action in an Authoritarian Legislature

• In Event: Legislatures and Legislators in Authoritarian Regimes

Abstract

How and when do legislators in an authoritarian parliament act collectively? Legislative bodies in authoritarian regimes are allocated important powers, including the ability to propose, amend, and pass legislation. Yet, critically, these authorities require a majority of member support to be successful. In other words, the legislature has the authority to challenge the regime-and exert independent influence over political outcomes-in theory, but it can only do so in practice when it is able to engage in collective action. I develop a theory about factors that favor or impede legislative collective action, including institutional characteristics as well as legislator attributes. I construct a historical dataset of bill cosponsorship by participants in the Kuwaiti legislature covering 15 legislative terms from 1963-2016 and including 5300 unique bills with 14000 MP cosponsors. I use network analysis to model cosponsorship behavior within legislative terms to examine how network attributes vary with legislative composition or institutional characteristics such as district size. I identify predictors of cosponsorship relationships within deputy pairs, including representing the same constituency or sharing social or ideological ties. I compare cosponsorship behavior with other forms of collective action, including legislative suggestions, interpellation of ministers, and voting on legislation to see whether these ties are indicative of broader patterns of behavior. Finally, I identify the legislators that are most central to the network-and therefore most able to initiate collective behavior. This study offers insight on when and how the legislature can act independently from the regime-and which legislators are most influential in this process.

Author

• Erin York, Vanderbilt University