Parliamentary Elites in Authoritarian Regimes: new data

Abstract

Authoritarian politics are largely defined and shaped by elite politics. Yet, our knowledge about political elites in nondemocracies remains confined to those in particular regimes or, cross-nationally, leaders at the highest echelons of decision-making. This article introduces a novel dataset, Parliamentary Elites in Authoritarian Regimes (PEAR), that fills this gap and provides comprehensive information on members of parliament (MPs) across nondemocracies. With currently more than 230,000 observations on individual MPs from 882 legislative terms in 133 authoritarian regimes from 1945 to 2024, PEAR is based on the largest individual-level demographic database on national legislators ever assembled and provides unprecedented information about these types of elites in authoritarian regimes. The dataset records MPs’ names, gender, age, party affiliation, incumbency status, and constituency, and uniquely classifies legislators into ruling-party members, regime-supporting elites, and opposition politicians. These are then aggregated into legislature-level variables in the country-year format, showing, for instance, the share of women in parliament, the MPs’ mean and median ages, the share of young and elder MPs, and legislatures’ retention rates. I first present how the dataset was created from publicly available sources, including parliamentary websites, electoral commissions, and election observer reports, then highlight descriptives, and validate it against existing datasets. I then illustrate an application of the data, generating new insights into the reshuffling of elites in authoritarian regimes. PEAR will be an invaluable resource for our understanding of autocracies.