Gaming Democracy's Gatekeepers: How Hybrid Regimes and Democracies Use International Parliamentary Institutions Differently

The rise of authoritarian and hybrid regimes poses fundamental challenges to global governance institutions designed to promote democracy. This paper examines a paradox at the heart of contemporary multilateralism: authoritarian regimes increasingly join democracy-promoting international organizations (IOs) while simultaneously intensifying domestic repression. Rather than treating this pattern as failed norm socialization, I argue that hybrid regimes systematically weaponize international parliamentary institutions (IPIs) through exploitative venue shopping that transforms accountability mechanisms into reputation-laundering tools. Drawing on original data encompassing all Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) motions over two decades, I demonstrate that hybrid regimes and consolidated democracies engage with the same institution in fundamentally different ways. Democratic delegations predominantly advance collective institutional mandates focused on multilateral cooperation and strengthening accountability frameworks. Hybrid regime delegations, by contrast, systematically externalize bilateral grievances, pursue regime legitimation objectives, and contest liberal democratic norms from within. This strategic heterogeneity represents a form of institutional disruption that fragments international parliamentary cooperation along regime-type fault lines. Methodologically, I combine supervised machine learning with network analysis to capture both the scale and relational dimensions of this phenomenon. Expert-coded exemplars train classification algorithms to identify venue shopping strategies across thousands of parliamentary motions, balancing contextual interpretation with comprehensive longitudinal coverage. Complementary network analysis reveals whether these strategic differences produce regime-clustered coalition structures, testing whether venue shopping actively fragments the cooperative architecture these institutions were designed to foster. The findings contribute to workshop themes on disruption in global governance in three key ways. First, they challenge assumptions about how domestic political transformations affect multilateral cooperation. Authoritarian engagement with IOs does not simply create barriers to cooperation through non-compliance or withdrawal. Instead, hybrid regimes exploit procedural openness and institutional design features intended to promote inclusion, actively undermining institutional effectiveness from within. This represents disruption not through exit or voice in conventional terms, but through strategic capture of democratic institutions' own mechanisms. Second, the paper reframes how we understand IO responses to authoritarian resurgence. Existing literature often treats institutional resilience as maintaining operational continuity under pressure. However, when institutions remain formally functional while being systematically exploited for purposes antithetical to their mandates, operational continuity may mask effectiveness decline. The strategic heterogeneity I document suggests that strengthening parliamentary engagement without addressing how different regime types weaponize these platforms may paradoxically entrench authoritarianism rather than facilitate reform. Third, this research speaks directly to opportunities for institutional innovation. By documenting how hybrid regimes exploit specific features, the analysis identifies concrete mechanisms through which IOs become vulnerable to disruptive actors. Effective institutional reform requires moving beyond assumptions of shared cooperative intent to frameworks that anticipate and constrain exploitative venue shopping while preserving genuine multilateral engagement. The broader theoretical implication concerns how we conceptualize disruption in global governance. Rather than treating authoritarian engagement as discrete non-compliance, this paper reveals systematic patterns through which domestic regime transformations generate institutional disruption. Understanding these dynamics is essential for assessing whether contemporary challenges represent opportunities for adaptive reform or symptoms of legitimacy erosion within democracy-promoting multilateral frameworks.