Policy and Opposition in the Middle East’s Authoritarian Legislatures (With Marwa Shalaby).
Under Advance Contract with Cambridge University Press, Elements in Middle East Politics.
Parliaments are ubiquitous in modern autocracies, and research on these legislatures has increasingly recognized their importance for a variety of political outcomes in these regimes. However, despite the long history of parliamentary politics in the Middle East, the region’s authoritarian legislatures tend to be viewed as particularly weak. As a result, existing research on the region has emphasized the narrow role these parliaments play in facilitating patronage distribution and ensuring regime survival, and their impact on policymaking and opposition politics has often been overlooked. Our Elements book will revise this understanding substantially by making two key points about parliaments in the Middle East’s autocracies. First, we will show how the formal powers of parliaments give these bodies meaningful influence over decision-making, even if they remain subordinate politically to the region’s powerful monarchs and presidents. These autocrats share actual power with legislators in several of the Middle East’s regimes, and those powers entail genuine influence over many policy outcomes. Second, we will also document how these powers are used extensively by opposition movements in the region to affect the policy agenda and push decision-making toward their preferences, including for issues that are sensitive to the ruling authorities. Parliaments in the Middle East are not just tools for ensuring political quiescence through the distribution of rents; rather, they are an active arena of politicking used by the opposition to contest the regime’s dominance over the policy process.