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ABSTRACT
Authoritarian governments remain in power much longer when they distribute benefits to their supporters in an institutionalised way. Permitting parliament to fulfil a legislative function is an important strategy for autocrats to obtain long-lasting support from their allies. Political parties play an important role in this process – while having strong influence on the behaviour of MPs, empirical evidence from the Russian State Duma suggests that loyalty is rewarded with support for the legislative proposals of individual members. Amendments to government bills are high in quantity and often substantially significant. Legislative performance is, however, mostly limited to the United Russia party.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Petr Kopecký and Maria Spirova for their helpful support at Leiden University and the feedback they gave on earlier versions of this article.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Gerrit Krol is a PhD researcher at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the European University Institute, Fiesole, Italy. His research interests include post-communist transitions, authoritarian politics and legislative institutions.
Notes
1 Competition is defined narrowly as an interaction between rivals with a common objective in which a participant's strength is not used directly against other participants, but only towards the aim itself. Winning competitive elections, therefore, must be aimed at obtaining votes, rather than intimidating opponents (Bartolini Citation1999, 440).
2 As policy-making is one of the core functions of legislatures, it seems reasonable to suggest that individual legislators have policy-making incentives. Office-seeking political actors seeking (private) spoils are more likely to obtain their resources through executive–administrative institutions.
3 Although it is not unreasonable to suggest that the opposite logic might be more applicable for authoritarian politics, the current analysis works under the assumption that politically salient bills are likely to be voted upon openly. Given that legislators are expected to be loyal to the executive on salient issues in exchange for influence, the government is unlikely to face fierce resistance to its policies when votes are open.
4 The Russian government does include members of the United Russia party. It has, however, been reported extensively (Hale Citation2005; Oversloot and Verheul Citation2006) that political parties in Russia (and other Eurasian dictatorships; Isaacs Citation2011) are too weak to function as the primary channel through which government personnel is recruited. Party membership usually comes after recruitment for government (Bader Citation2011).
5 Accessible at http://vote.duma.gov.ru/.
6 Linear models are inappropriate when response variables are bounded between zero and one because “predicted values from an OLS regression can never be guaranteed to lie in the unit interval” (Papke and Wooldridge Citation1996, 619–620; Ramalho, Ramalho, and Murteira Citation2011). Because no software is available that can specify a fractional logit model with mixed effects, however, the fractional models do not take variations across different committees in account. For this reason, the fractional logit models have been re-specified as multilevel linear models to analyse the data with random intercepts that indicate variations across standing committees.
7 The standing committee that has been designated by the Duma Council as the responsible committee (otvetstvenny komitet) compiles lists that contain all the amendments to a specific bill. Lists with amendments (tablitsy popravok) are available online at http://asozd2.duma.gov.ru.
8 Informational-Analytical Bulletin available at http://iam.duma.gov.ru/node/1 (available in Russian only).
9 A list with selected bills is available upon request.
10 A random integer generator was used to randomly select amendments from the numbered the lists compiled by responsible committees.
11 See note 6.
12 Choosing length as an indicator of significance is, however, not uncommon (see for instance Blondel et al. Citation1970). The logic is that, although it may happen occasionally that a small textual change or a short clause entails a significant change by adding crucial terms, or vice versa that a long change/clause deals exclusively and extensively with small technicalities, it is more likely (and, hence, more frequently) to be the case that a short change/clause concerns an uncomplicated issue, whereas a long change/clause refers to a large, substantial change with more legal implications.
13 An amendment may introduce a high degree of change, but if the clause is non-significant, then the indicator of change does not tell us much.