When Do Legislatures Resist Autocratization? A Comparative QCA Analysis

While opposition to autocratization has attracted growing scholarly attention, legislatures remain surprisingly underexplored as potential countervailing institutions. Existing research tends to focus on political parties, social movements, or courts, while legislative studies themselves rarely engage in systematic cross-national comparison. This paper seeks to address both gaps by examining when and how legislatures have successfully resisted autocratization in the post–Cold War period. The paper advances a legislature-centered perspective on opposition to autocratization and presents one of the few larger-N comparative analyses of legislative resistance. Drawing on the Varieties of Democracy Episodes of Regime Transformation (ERT) dataset, it identifies post–Cold War episodes of autocratization that did not culminate in democratic breakdown, including cases of pre-empted regression, diminished democracy, and averted autocratization. These episodes are analyzed using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to identify the institutional pathways and combinations of conditions associated with successful legislative resistance. The analysis codes both formal legislative prerogatives and their de facto exercise, using V-Dem indicators related to legislatures and party representation. It further controls for contextual factors such as electoral and party systems, political and economic crises, and regime legacies that may shape legislative capacity. To complement the set-theoretic analysis, the paper draws on the Democratic Erosion Event Dataset and selected case narratives to illustrate how legislatures mobilize their powers in practice. By identifying the institutional configurations under which legislatures can constrain autocratization, the paper contributes to comparative regime studies and legislative politics, highlighting parliaments as active and potentially decisive actors in democratic resilience.