+ Daniel L. Tavana and Erin York. “Legislative Cooptation in Authoritarian Regimes: Policy Cooperation in the Kuwait National Assembly.” Under review.
This article examines how authoritarian regimes use legislative institutions to coopt rival elites and induce policy cooperation. Theories of cooptation under authoritarianism emphasize two mechanisms in particular: economic rents and policy concessions. Despite the persistence of these mechanisms in the authoritarian politics literature, evidence of their use in legislative institutions and their effect on policy outcomes remains limited. In this paper, we develop a theory of legislative cooptation, or the intentional exchange of economic rents and policy concessions to legislators in exchange for policy cooperation. We test our theory using a novel dataset of 150,000 roll call votes from the Kuwait National Assembly that spans the entirety of Kuwait’s legislative history. We leverage the regime’s participation in the legislature to establish a measure of legislative cooperation and use this measure to estimate the efficacy of mechanisms of cooptation in inducing conformity with its policy agenda. We find that though both mechanisms are similarly effective in eliciting cooperation, they have different strategic and normative implications for our understanding of how representation can emerge in non-democratic contexts.
+ Daniel L. Tavana. “Endogenous Opposition: Identity and Ideology in Kuwaiti Electoral Politics.” Under review.
Autocrats hold elections to mitigate elite and distributive conflict. Many autocrats rely on the construction of elite coalitions to sustain their rule. Often, the institutionalization of ethnic, group, or identity-based differences facilitates the creation of these coalitions. Yet ethnic coalitions often result in the electoral exclusion of minorities. Drawing on novel archival data from Kuwait, the author presents evidence that following the implementation of a new electoral law in 1980, excluded minority elites used ideological appeals to mobilize out-group voters. As the use of these ideological appeals diffused, oppositional activity in the legislature increased. The author shows that, in Kuwait, elections themselves facilitated the endogenous expansion of opposition. Once elected, elites who ran in elections using ideological appeals frequently blocked the ruling Al-Sabah family's legislative agenda. Qualitative and quantitative tests of the argument probe the theory's implications for the study of authoritarian politics and account for alternative explanations.
+ Daniel L. Tavana. “Ideology, Constraint, and Support for Authoritarian Rule.” In Progress.
Ideology is central to the study of public opinion and political behavior. In advanced democracies, latent variable models are typically used to assess the structure and dimensionality of ideology in these contexts. An enduring debate in the literature focuses on the strength of the connection between these dimensions and ideological and partisan self-identification. But in many authoritarian regimes, this self-identification is weaker and fraught with empirical challenges, leading many to conclude that ideology exhibits weak constraint in these contexts. In this paper, I use the tools of network psychometrics to provide evidence that public preferences do exhibit constraint in authoritarian regimes. I draw on original data collected from a nationally representative probability survey of Iranian citizens to argue that Iranian public opinion is organized into several "clusters" of beliefs related to the role of religion, the suitability of democratic institutions, nationalism, and gender inequality. Trust in the regime is the central belief in this network and its centrality is consistent across several subgroups. Last, I provide two empirical applications of the network to show how ideology shapes voter behavior and political participation.
+ Daniel L. Tavana, Kevan Harris, and Zep Kalb. “Mass Protest and Electoral Behavior in Authoritarian Regimes: Evidence from the Islamic Republic of Iran.” In Progress.
How do protest events shape support for incumbents in contemporary authoritarian regimes? Recent evidence from advanced democracies suggests mass protest plays a pivotal role in shaping the electoral attitudes and behaviors of voters. To date, fewer studies have theorized an electoral connection in authoritarian regimes, where protest and participation in non-democratic elections occur concurrently. In this paper, we develop and test a theory that links the incidence of protest with participation in a subsequent election. Drawing on a unique dataset of protest events in the year leading up to the 2021 presidential election, we show that local-level protest intensity resulted in a decline in support for Ebrahim Raisi, an anointed pro-government candidate who won the election. To do this, we pair this dataset with a nationally representative post-election survey to trace the mechanisms linking protest intensity with voter behavior. We then supplement these findings with a staggered difference-in-differences design that compares results from the 2017 and 2021 elections. We use a variety of statistical tests to assess endogeneity concerns. Our findings lend support to the argument that mass protest can serve as a powerful constraint to the electoral machinations of autocrats who hold non-democratic findings. The paper probes the implications of our findings for the study of authoritarian politics. Mass protest may demobilize citizens: but this demobilization can blunt the support of incumbents and facilitate the expansion of opposition to authoritarian rule.
+ Erin York and Daniel L. Tavana. “Ideological Positioning in the Kuwait National Assembly.” In Progress.
How do legislative elections and the ideology of the winners affect policy outcomes in authoritarian legislatures? Policy-making within authoritarian legislatures has long been a black box. Recent work has demonstrated these institutions matter for policy-making, but the role of legislator preferences in this process has not been clearly established. In this paper, we adapt a spatial model of roll call voting to study the history of policy-making in the Kuwaiti National Assembly from 1963 to 2016. We employ a Bayesian Item Response Theory model to extract information about legislator preferences and policy decisions from a vast database (n = 184000) of roll call votes on proposed legislation. We use the resulting estimates to explore ideological cleavages between pro- and anti-regime actors in periods with varying electoral institutions and on differing policy topics. We identify scenarios in which disparate opposition groups were able to form legislative coalitions as well as periods in which they experienced deeper policy cleavages to demonstrate how the regime stokes ideological divisions amongst groups that acquire legislative representation. Finally, we explore determinants of ideological positioning amongst legislators and find that they are a function of sociological factors (tribe and religion) in addition to partisan influence. The results shed light on the strategic behavior of the regime in manipulating legislator behavior as well as on the importance of legislative composition for resulting policy.