Beyond the Rubber-Stamp: Essays on Parliamentary Bodies Under Authoritarianism

Abstract

This dissertation explores the political place of parliaments under stable authoritarian rule. Three thematically connected essays on authoritarian parliaments are broken across five theoretical, conceptual, and empirical chapters. The first essay develops a theory to explain variation in politically-relevant parliamentary activity in electoral authoritarian regimes. Empirically, it relies on a qualitative case-study of the Russian State Duma under Vladimir Putin's tenure, generating a broader theory of parliamentary activity. The second essay investigates the dynamics of substantive policymaking in an authoritarian parliament and subsequent authoritarian policy diffusion. This essay uses the puzzle of controversial moral-cultural bills which were developed in the Russian parliament and then diffused across the post-Soviet Eurasian region. A third essay intervenes conceptually in standard regime-type frameworks, using experiments in authoritarian constitutionalism in Interwar Eastern Europe to develop an alternative schema of authoritarian political order. It then transposes this conceptualization to recent constitutional changes in Eurasia, noting the similarities between these two time-periods in moving beyond and away from the standard structural model of electoral authoritarianism, and highlighting the particular role that parliamentary and conciliar institutions have within more forthrightly hierarchical authoritarian orders.