Why do authoritarian legislatures support regime durability? Existing literature focuses on country-level or case study data, but lacks detailed, within-country data on rent distribution to citizens needed to understand why authoritarian legislatures support regime durability. Drawing on original surveys from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Jordan conducted 2007-2014, this paper shows that institutional setting and resource endowments systematically shape parliamentarian-citizen linkages and have implications for regime stability. Socially-embedded, personalistic linkages are more common in monarchies and oil rich economies than resource poor and single-party dominant regimes. Yet, non-personalistic, anonymous linkages are less effective than personalistic linkages in fostering citizen satisfaction with the government. By theorizing and empirically demonstrating variation in the social embeddedness of rent distribution, this paper extends literature on political clientelism, authoritarian institutions, and regime breakdown and helps explain why resource poor, single-party dominant regimes (Tunisia and Egypt) were vulnerable to regime collapse.