Policy Responsiveness in Autocratic Legislatures: Accountability, Cooptation, and Repression in Kuwait’s National Assembly

This study explores how authoritarian regimes (strategically) respond to elected representatives’ (MPs) policy and accountability demands. As part of the state’s power sharing arrangements, MPs possess policymaking and can hold regime elites accountable. Using novel datasets, I show how MPs manipulate legislative institutions to pressure the ruling elite, making it costly for the regime to ignore. This research also examines the impact of informal accountability on regime responsiveness. I scrape all MPs Twitter (X) posts and create a dataset with all their threats against ministers. The aim of this research is to show how various micro-level institutional factors shape powersharing arrangements in autocracies.