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Please join the Comparative Politics Workshop as they host Fiona Shen-Bayh, Assistant Professor of Government & Politics at the University of Maryland.

How does the repression of opposition leaders outside of parliament affect legislative behavior within it? Prior research has emphasized the effects of opposition repression on democratic mobilization, protest, and elections, but few works examine its consequences on legislative behavior, particularly in terms of speech-making and contentious debate. She explore these dynamics by focusing on the Edgar Lungu presidency in Zambia, a context wherein Lungu's main presidential rival, Hakainde Hichilema, was infamously arrested and prosecuted on charges of sedition and treason. To understand the effects of opposition repression on democratic debate, she leverages a difference-in-differences design to compare parliamentary speech patterns of opposition and incumbent party legislators before and after the arrest of the opposition leader. Using a corpus of parliamentary speeches from the Zambian National Assembly comprising more than 350,000 speaking turns between 2011-2021, she finds a marked deterioration in the quantity and quality of debate following the arrest. Her difference-in-differences analysis shows that the arrest resulted in a persistent reduction in the frequency and length of speeches made by opposition legislators as well as their discussion of substantive policy issues. She descriptively show that opposition legislators were more likely to be interrupted during their speaking turn and even denied requests to speak by the House Speaker, which she interpret as increased incivility towards opposition members following the arrest of their leader. Her findings demonstrate the pernicious dynamics of repression, including the indirect consequences of violence on opposition behavior, which has implications for freedom of speech and democratic representation in new democracies.

Fiona Shen-Bayh is an Assistant Professor of Government & Politics with a joint appointment at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. She is a scholar of authoritarian politics, focusing on legal and judicial power. Her book Undue Process (Cambridge University Press) examines these dynamics in postcolonial Africa and won multiple awards in 2023, including the Theodore J. Lowi First Book Award. She also studies issues of access to justice and legacies of autocratic rule. She is a faculty affiliate at the Interdisciplinary Lab for Computational Social Science (iLCSS) and the Center for International Development and Conflict Management. Fiona’s research has appeared in American Political Science Review, The Journal of Politics, and World Politics. She holds a PhD from University of California, Berkeley.

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