Lawmaking in personalist dictatorships: evidence from Spain

ABSTRACT

How does lawmaking work in personalist dictatorships? Assuming that legislative institutions established within power-sharing arrangements become costly for dictators to ignore and are consequently likely to affect lawmaking processes and outcomes, we argue that while legislatures in personalist dictatorships may approve most government initiatives, they can affect lawmaking via amendments, which signal factional disagreement and may prompt dictators to kill their own bills. We test this argument by analysing the performance of the Cortes under Franco’s regime in Spain. We find that while its members intervened only in a share of the legislative agenda, and rarely rejected government bills, they still introduced many consequential amendments that reduced the likelihood of bill enactment.

KEYWORDS:

• Authoritarian legislatures
• autocracy
• lawmaking
• franquismo
• Spain

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1 Giménez Martínez, 2014, p. 233

2 Council meetings were confidential, so we do not have information about levels of disagreement therein. However, given that, as shown below, Franco could choose whether to send bills to the Cortes, we assume two theoretical possibilities for him doing it: either disagreement within the Council appeared to be significant, or Franco himself was not convinced that consensus therein was representative of factional opinions.

3 Giménez Martínez, 2014

4 Reglamento de las Cortes Españolas

5 Giménez Martínez, 2012a

6 The Cortes regulations only contemplated amendments, not suggestions. Since the files still recorded these, we collected the data, but as regulations ignored them, we did not use them as dependent variables.

7 https://app.congreso.es/est_sesiones/.

8 We checked multiple sources for each Minister, and identified their factional affiliation when a minimum of two sources indicated they belonged to the same faction. The sources employed were the biographical dictionary of the Real Academia Española (http://dbe.rah.es/), Alvarez Puga (1970) and Miguel (1975).

9 Table 1 in the Appendix provides information on legislative activity per faction.

10 We considered bills from the ministries of Agriculture, Commerce, Finance, Industry, Public Works, Development Planning, and Labor to deal with economic topics, except for those pertaining to individual pensions (identified using the keywords ‘pensión’, ‘pension’, and ‘pensiones’).

11 Zwart (2015).

12 Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas and World Bank Open Data (indicator NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG).

13 For graphs with the estimated change in probability of bill enactment, see the Appendix.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alejandro Bonvecchi

Alejandro Bonvecchi (Ph.d in Government, University of Essex) is currently an Associate Professor at the American University of Sharjah, Department of International Studies. His research focuses on comparative political economy, legislative and presidential politics.

Emilia Simison

Emilia Simison is a Ph.D. candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research focuses on the comparative political economy of policymaking and policy change. She studies policymaking, under both democratic and authoritarian regimes, with a regional focus on Latin America. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, she analyzes how political institutions across regime types shape the extent to which interest groups influence policymaking, and how that affects policy outputs. She received an MA from Torcuato Di Tella University and a BA from the University of Buenos Aires, both in Political Science.