Defending Democracy: When – and Why – do Parliaments Protect Political Space?

Authoritarian incumbents, and democratically elected leaders with authoritarian tendencies, can close political space in a variety of ways. One increasingly popular tactic is to suppress civil society by restricting its access to foreign funding and controlling its activities through requirements to register. This often occurs in divided societies in which the ruling party paints civil society as a threat to stability, and manipulates the growth of radical groups to pass anti-terror legislation that enables them to exert control over a range of non-state actors. Parliaments – who ought to be defenders of democracy – often aid and abet executives in this process. This paper examines when – and why – parliaments act to protect political space. Comparing several cases that vary on relevant dimensions, including Kenya and Kyrgyzstan, it exposes the critical role of the incentives facing individual legislators, including those linked to social divides. This is important because international democracy promoters tend to cast this problem as a technical one, assuming that law-makers are somehow unaware that proposed legislation will erode political freedoms. Given such a diagnosis, they prescribe technical solutions, such as the provision of information. Our findings suggest that if democracy’s supporters want parliaments to protect political space, they must give them reasons to do so.