Nodding or Needling: Analyzing Delegate Responsiveness in an Authoritarian Parliament

Abstract

R ecent scholarship argues that one solution to ensure longevity and economic growth in an authoritarian regime is to co-opt potential opposition by offering them limited policy influence in a national legislature. Although cooptation theory generates a number of predictions for delegate behavior within an authoritarian parliament, the opacity of such regimes has made empirical confirmation difficult. We resolve this problem by exploiting the transcripts of query sessions in the Vietnamese National Assembly, where delegates question the prime minister and Cabinet members on important issues of the day. Using a content analysis of queries, we offer the first empirical test of delegate behavior in nondemocratic parliaments. We find that some delegates exhibit behavior consistent with cooptation theory by actively participating in sessions, demonstrating criticism of authorities, and responding to the needs of local constituents. Such responsiveness, however, is parameterized by regime rules for nominating, electing, and assigning parliamentary responsibilities to individual delegates.

What Do We Know about Hybrid Regimes after Two Decades of Scholarship?

“…This allows for more parsimonious categorization by creating mutually exclusive categories that classify regimes as being democratic or authoritarian (Cheibub, Gandhi, & Vreeland, 2010;Sartori, 1987). The presence of political institutions that have been integral to democratization in the West contribute to the hybridity of the regime, such as political parties (Gandhi, 2008;Greene, 2009;Magaloni & Kricheli, 2010); elections (Brownlee, 2007;Gandhi & Lust-Okar, 2009) and the legislature (Gandhi & Przeworski, 2007;Malesky & Schuler, 2010). However, Cassani (2014) notes that these scholars downplay the mixed nature of the regime, because the presence of democratic institutions does not fundamentally alter the identity of the authoritarian regime itself.…”

The Adverse Effects of Sunshine: A Field Experiment on Legislative Transparency in an Authoritarian Assembly

“…These variables included (1) whether the delegate was centrally or locally nominated; (2) fulltime status; (3) whether the delegate was over the age of 65 (past retirement age), and (4) the delegate's historical activity measured by how many questions they asked in previous sessions (Malesky and Schuler 2010). Table 1 shows the result of our randomization with pvalues and t-scores, based on t-tests comparing means of unequal variance between the treatment and control group for each variable.…”

“…Consequently, it is important to control for variables that may be associated with both Internet penetration and increased (or decreased) participation in the VNA. These include (1) a dummy variable for whether the locality is designated as one of Vietnam's five nationallevel cities, and therefore a populous, dense, and technologically advanced urban center; (2) GDP per capita, to capture provincial wealth; (3) population, measured in millions of citizens; (4) transfers as a percentage of locally produced revenue, which gauges the dependence of a province on central beneficence and has been shown to affect delegate participation (Malesky and Schuler 2010) and local-level market orientation (Malesky and Taussig 2009); and (5) the quality of provincial governance, as measured by the Vietnamese Provincial Competitiveness Index, an annual ranking of economic governance for private sector development in the country, measuring such issues as corruption, property rights protection, and local transparency (Malesky 2009). …”

Who Controls Foreign Aid? Elite versus Public Perceptions of Donor Influence in Aid-Dependent Uganda

“…41 Humphreys and Weinstein 2012. 42 Boix 2003;Gandhi and Przeworski 2006;Malesky and Schuler 2010. similar to the actual parliament at that time, which we discuss below. 43 Second, we conducted a nationally representative experiment on nearly 3,600 citizens in 42 of Uganda's 112 districts.…”