Legislative Effectiveness in Authoritarian Parliaments – Evidence on Law-making in the Russian State Duma and the Kazakh Mazhilis

Authoritarian governments remain in power much longer when they distribute benefits to their supporters in an institutionalized way. Recent theory suggests that an effective legislative function of parliament constitutes an important regime characteristic through which autocrats co-opt and obtain long-lasting support from their parliamentary allies. Empirical evidence on the law-making function of authoritarian parliaments remains, however, scarce. The paper presents original legislative data from the Russian State Duma and the Kazakh Mazhilis and finds that the quantity of legislative output of authoritarian parliaments varies across countries and time. Parliaments in both countries effectively use their prerogative to initiate legislation and have significantly increased their output of initiative over time. The Russian Duma proves to be consistently stronger on initiative than the Kazakh parliament. Whereas Russian MPs initiate between 30% and almost half of all enacted laws, members of the Kazakh Mazhilis have come to initiate around 15% of the county’s legislative output. Regarding the right of amendment, the data show that both parliaments play an equally important role in redrafting government bills. Using fuzzy string matching techniques, the analysis shows that original government drafts submitted to parliament change significantly before they are enacted. Both parliaments have become increasingly successful over time in their realization of the right to amend. Based on the systematic analysis of the content of legislation, however, it must be noted that – from a substantive point of view – the legislative activities of both parliaments relate mostly to laws that seem politically uncontroversial. Employing two conceptual dimensions that measure the conspicuity of sanctions and affected actors in a law, the analysis shows that most law-making work of authoritarian parliaments concerns bills that are unlikely to cause social upheaval due to the scarcity of punitive elements and a low frequency of reference to particular social groups that may be affected by the law concerned. Nevertheless, evidence suggests as well that – in a few cases – both parliaments initiate and amend politically significant laws. The paper concludes with suggestions for further explanatory work.