Coopting Workers under Dictatorship

What explains the variance in how authoritarian regimes treat labor? We advance a theory of why and how some dictatorships coopt workers using nominally democratic institutions, such as legislatures and political parties. When dictatorships need cooperation from society and face a potentially strong opposition, they attempt to coopt workers to reinforce their bases of support. As instruments of cooptation, legislatures and parties are useful in facilitating a political exchange between regimes and labor: dictatorships provide material benefits to workers in exchange for labor’s quiescence. As a result, institutionalized dictatorships provide more benefits to workers and experience lower levels of labor protest than their noninstitutionalized counterparts. We find empirical support for these hypotheses from a sample of all dictatorships from the 1946–96 period.