The Limits of Control: Networks of the Legislative Cosponsorship and the Individual Strategies of the Legislators in the Authoritarian Parliaments

Abstract

The project is dedicated to developing the theoretical framework and research design for the study of co-sponsorship networks in authoritarian legislatures. Although these studies are widely implemented in the research focused on parliaments in democracies there are still gaps in understanding legislators' cooperation in an authoritarian context. Moreover, there is a prejudice in political science as many scholars agree that parliaments in most authoritarian regimes are not decisive political institutions. Nevertheless, recently there is increasing scholarly interest in uncovering the role of parliaments in authoritarian settings. As the legislative bodies play a lesser role in the representation of public interests they may fulfill a number of functions in favor of authoritarian elites. Basically, they provide legitimation of the policies elaborated by autocrats and thus fulfill the role of normative action. Furthermore, the ongoing research projects all over the wide range of authoritarian states uncover the different impacts of these legislatures on the policy processes despite the considerable limitations constrained by the authoritarian regimes.The formation of coalitions is widely known as the basic mechanism of legislative action. The members of parliaments collaborate in different ways from seeking the support of exact initiatives to the establishment of long-term ties and alignment on a wide range of political and policy views. As the democratic parliaments are well studied there is rich literature on coalitions in these settings. However, we still may pose the question of the relevance of the search for coalitions in authoritarian parliaments. For instance, the political stability, that is maintained by the parliamentary coalitions in a democratic setting, stands on the other foundations in non-democracies. So are there coalitions in the authoritarian parliaments? If yes, what is the purpose of the coalitions? As there is always a ruling majority that is capable of adopting any initiative that comes from the autocrat, influential interest group, or arises inside the faction the role of the coalitions is presumably different from the democratic ones. To what extent do members of such legislatures follow their personal strategies and collaborate with each other when there are no exogenic directions from the ruling elites? What are the limits of authoritarian control of the parliament? And what is the room for the individual strategies of the legislators to follow their lobbying framework or the voters' interests?In the proposed study we fulfill at least two basic goals. First, we develop the theoretical framework to apply the co-sponsorship networks methodology in the research of authoritarian parliaments. Second, we are going to conduct a study of co-sponsorship networks that emerged during the 7th convocation of the State Duma of the Russian Federation. We will use the data for the legislative co-sponsorship network obtained from the database of the Federal Assembly via API. The structured data contains information about MPs and the bills that they have sponsored or co-sponsored. Finally, we will test the hypotheses on different predictors for the emergence of co-sponsorship ties and explain the individual strategies that legislators follow. (AU)