Legislatures and Regime Survival: Why Strong Authoritarian Institutions Help Democratization

This paper examines how authoritarian legislative institutions affect regime survival. I argue that authoritarian legislatures and party systems, even when devised to quell threats from au-thoritarian rivals, can influence the distribution of power in a subsequent democracy. When legislative institutions and party systems help protect the interests of authoritarian elites in new democracies, these institutions increase the likelihood of democratization. Accounting for se-lection and using a multinomial choice model on a data set of 200 authoritarian regimes in 108 countries from 1950 to 2002, I find that authoritarian legislatures decrease the probability of being replaced by a subsequent authoritarian regimes in all regime types, but increase the prob-ability of democratization in military and single party regimes, and when the dictator does not have access to abundant natural resource rents