Authoritarian Institutions and Democratic Lessons
Does the experiential legacy of participating in autocratic legislatures influence how autocratic-era opposition parties and politicians want to use legislatures in a subsequent democracy? Do they learn to use legislatures to strengthen or undermine democracy? Given the frequency of institutionalized autocracies, of opposition party led post-transition governments, and importance of legislatures in democracies these are important questions. This paper addresses them by first drawing on research on authoritarian legacies, and on organizational and individual learning to identify three potential institutional lessons opposition parties and politicians could learn from their autocratic legislative experience about how to use legislatures in a subsequent democracy. It then uses data from a survey of almost 200 Egyptian politicians conducted during the 2011 elections to test which lessons parties and politicians learned by focusing on their support for protecting judicial independence from legislative interference in the future democratic regime. We find that (i) experienced opposition parties learn a democracy-strengthening institutional lesson, (ii) experienced opposition politicians learn a democracy-weakening institutional lesson, and (iii) membership in an experienced opposition party curbed the undemocratic institutional preferences of experienced politicians. Thus, authoritarian institutions leave diverse legacies among ruling and opposition parties and politicians with very different consequences for subsequent democracy.
Vineeta Yadav, Authoritarian Institutions and Democratic Lessons, Political Research Quarterly (76, 2) pp. 784-800. Copyright © 2022. DOI: 10.1177/10659129221110231. Users who receive access to an article through a repository are reminded that the article is protected by copyright and reuse is restricted to non-commercial and no derivative uses. Users may also download and save a local copy of an article accessed in an institutional repository for the user's personal reference. For permission to reuse an article, please follow our Process for Requesting Permission.
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Work Title | Authoritarian Institutions and Democratic Lessons |
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License | In Copyright (Rights Reserved) |
Work Type | Article |
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Publication Date | July 13, 2022 |
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Deposited | September 02, 2024 |
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