Replication Data for: Legislative Cooptation in Authoritarian Regimes: Policy Cooperation in the Kuwait National Assembly

This article examines how authoritarian regimes use legislative institutions to coopt rival elites and induce policy cooperation. Theories of cooptation under authoritarianism emphasize two mechanisms in particular: economic rents and policy concessions. Despite the persistence of these mechanisms in the authoritarian politics literature, evidence of their use in legislative institutions and their effect on policy outcomes remains limited. In this paper, we develop a theory of legislative cooptation, or the intentional exchange of economic rents and policy concessions to legislators in exchange for policy cooperation. We test our theory using a novel dataset of 150,000 roll call votes from the Kuwait National Assembly that spans the entirety of Kuwait’s legislative history. We leverage the regime’s participation in the legislature to establish a measure of legislative cooperation and use this measure to estimate the efficacy of mechanisms of cooptation in inducing conformity with its policy agenda. We find that though both mechanisms are similarly effective in eliciting cooperation, they have different strategic and normative implications for our understanding of how representation can emerge in non-democratic contexts.