The Democratic Returns of Pluralism in Autocracy: Opposition Representation and Local Development in Cambodia's Commune Councils

The proliferation of competitive authoritarian regimes has rendered the participation of legal opposition parties commonplace in authoritarian elections, legislatures, and sub-national councils, yet we know little about how the opposition's participation in these institutions affects governance. In this paper, I theorize several mechanisms through which the opposition party's participation in local authoritarian institutions might "matter" for public goods delivery: political competition, opposition oversight, and opposition representation. Drawing on original data on over 16,000 local infrastructure projects in Cambodia, I find evidence that increased political competition alone fails to lead to improvements in local governance; however, increases in the opposition's share of seats in local institutions leads to significant improvements in procurement practices consistent with better governance. The findings suggest that opposition parties' participation in local political institutions can have important effects on authoritarian governance, even when prospects for outright opposition victory remain low.