Emilia Simison
Speaker
Lecturer in Latin American Politics, Queen Mary University of London
Lawmaking under Authoritarianism: Factions, Institutions, and Outcomes Across Dictatorships
Date and Time
March 10, 2026
12:00PM - 01:30PM EDT
Location
CGIS South, Room S216
No registration required to attend in person.
Why are legislatures in some authoritarian regimes more powerful than in others? Why does their influence on policies and politics vary across dictatorships? Alejandro Bonvecchi and Emilia Simison answer these questions in Lawmaking under Authoritarianism. Factions, Institutions, and Outcomes Across Dictatorships(Cambridge University Press, 2026) analysing novel datasets and primary sources from past dictatorships in Argentina, Brazil, and Spain. In this talk, Emilia will present the main theories and findings of the book in conversation with the chair and audience members.
This event is presented in collaboration with the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.
Steven Levitsky
Moderator
Director, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies; David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies; Professor of Government, Harvard
Alisha C. Holland
Professor of Government, Department of Government
Bios
Emilia Simison is a Lecturer in Latin American Politics at Queen Mary University of London. Her research focuses on the comparative political economy of policymaking and policy change. Using qualitative and quantitative methods, she analyses how political institutions across regime types shape the extent to which citizens and interest groups influence policymaking and outputs. As part of this research agenda, her forthcoming book explores the relationship between regime types and public policies to better understand how, and under which conditions, policy change takes place following regime type transitions.
She holds a PhD in Political Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she specialized in Comparative Political Economy and Methodology, an MA from Torcuato Di Tella University and a BA from the University of Buenos Aires. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Inter-American Policy and Research and a PhD Fellow at CONICET.
She co-organizes the Authoritarian Political Systems Group.
Steven Levitsky is David Rockefeller Professor of Latin American Studies and Professor of Government and Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. He is Senior Fellow at the Kettering Foundation and a Senior Democracy Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His research focuses on democratization and authoritarianism, political parties, and weak and informal institutions, with a focus on Latin America. He is co-author (with Daniel Ziblatt) of How Democracies Die, which was a New York Times Best-Seller and was published in 30 languages, and Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. He has written or edited 11 other books, including Transforming Labor-Based Parties in Latin America: Argentine Peronism in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press 2003), Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes after the Cold War (with Lucan Way) (Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Durable Authoritarianism (with Lucan Way) (Princeton University Press, 2022). He and Lucan Way are currently working on a book on democratic resilience across the world.
Professor Levitsky has written for New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs, and The New Republic, and he has been a columnist for La Republica (Peru) and Folha de São Paulo (Brazil).
Alisha C. Holland studies the comparative political economy of development with a focus on Latin America. Her first book, Forbearance as Redistribution: The Politics of Informal Welfare in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2017), examines the politics of law enforcement against the poor. She is working on a new book on the institutional determinants and challenges of infrastructure investment in Latin America. Prior to joining the faculty, she was an assistant professor in the Politics Department at Princeton University and a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows.