Lawmaking under Authoritarianism

Why are legislatures in some authoritarian regimes more powerful than in others? Why does their influence on policies and politics vary across dictatorships?

In this talk, Emilia Simison will present her recently published co-author book which extends the power-sharing theory of authoritarian government to answer these questions.

The book argues that in autocracies with balanced factional politics, legislatures are more powerful and influential than in regimes where factional politics is unbalanced or in those where it is unstable, because the former feature reviser legislatures that amend and reject significant shares of executive initiatives and are able to block or reverse policies preferred by dictators, while the latter feature notary legislatures that may amend executive bills but rarely reject them, and regimes with unstable factional politics oscillate between these two extremes.

Using novel datasets based on extensive archival research, this book provides strong quantitative evidence and qualitative case studies backing these arguments for the dictatorships of Argentina (1976-83), Brazil (1964-85), and Spain (1936-76).

Author biography:

Emilia Simison is a Lecturer in Latin American Politics at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on the comparative political economy of policymaking and policy change. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, she analyzes how political institutions across regime types shape the extent to which citizens and interest groups influence policymaking and outputs. As part of this research agenda, her forthcoming book explores the relationship between regime types and public policies to better understand how, and under which conditions, policy change takes place following regime type transitions.

She holds a PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she specialized in Comparative Political Economy and Methodology, an MA from Torcuato Di Tella University and a BA from the University of Buenos Aires. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research and a PhD Fellow at CONICET.

She co-organizes the Authoritarian Political Systems Group.

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Host or Publisher UCL Institute of the Americas