Subnational Comparative Politics

What causes stark differences in living standards between subnational units? What can countries do to lessen such variations? This article argues that there is an aspect of national policy frameworks that impacts subnational provision of social services: the sensitivity of policy to the particularities of place. Place-sensitive policies make adaptations to the way social services are organized and provided across a country so that they are better equipped to deal with the different characteristics of places and better support their wellbeing. When policies are place-sensitive, subnational provision is facilitated in poor, rural, and marginal locations of a country. In contrast, place-blind policies employ a one-size-fits-all approach that excludes people in vulnerable areas and aggravates inequalities in social service provision and social outcomes.  By studying the Colombian case, this article demonstrates that a key place-blind feature of its healthcare model disproportionately affects small localities.

Across many developing countries, the power sector persistently underperforms despite years of market reform efforts. India, where de facto responsibility for the power sector rests with subnational (state) governments, provides a useful laboratory to examine why. The state of West Bengal provides an example of public sector reform as an alternative to the so-called " World Bank template " for electricity liberalization, and a lens on the political preconditions for reform success. Drawing on 30 elite interviews in 2016 alongside comparative evidence from other Indian states, this article documents the reform design and assesses its success. West Bengal's reforms aimed at internally strengthening the utility against political interference. The study finds that this reform model delivered initial performance among the best of any Indian utility, and that successful reforms in several other states were also more statist than often recognized. However, longer-term sustainability remains challenging. While weak rural lobbies had some effect, the study explains this trajectory as the result of the transition from one-party dominance to intensified party-political competition, a finding that resonates with evidence from other Indian states. In contrast to influential political theories developed in the Global North, this suggests that party-political competition does not make Indian politicians more likely to deliver public services, but rather leads to short-termism and political capture of utilities. Conversely, under some conditions one-party dominance can encourage longer-term reforms. The study thus assesses the promise and limits of public sector reforms as an alternative to liberalization, and suggests how electoral competition can influence development priorities in Indian states.

The existence of political families is a well‐known fact in Mexican politics. Since the early 20th century, national and subnational politicians in Mexico have been related to other politicians. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Mexico initiated a democratization process that opened the political system to greater contestation, participation, and enforcement of electoral rules. Yet, 30 years after the onset of democratization and the demise of single‐party rule, political families and dynasties continue to be important in Mexican politics. It is even more noticeable at the subnational level, where governors with blood or marital links to other politicians have governed in 27 of the 32 states (84%) since 1989. The aim of this article is to map the existence of subnational political dynasties in Mexico since the transition to democracy and to analyze some possible explanations of this phenomenon. The article makes three main contributions. First, it provides a comprehensive overview of the family relations of all governors elected to the 32 federal entities (states and the autonomous Mexico City) since 1989. Next, it explores some of the explanations advanced by the literature and analyses them in the Mexican case. Finally, it analyses the 2021 gubernatorial elections and the role that family politics played in these elections.

La investigación “Régimen y territorio. Trayectorias de desarrollo del régimen político a nivel subnacional en Colombia 1988-2011” estudia la transformación del régimen político en su faceta de competencia política en todos los municipios del país. Con este fin utiliza las trayectorias de desarrollo de Daniel Nagin para ver cómo ha evolucionado la competencia política en las elecciones a alcaldías municipales a partir de las reformas de democratización del siglo pasado hasta el año 2011. El estudio encontró que el régimen político tiende hacerse más competitivo después de las reformas, pero a nivel subnacional se pueden identificar diferentes patrones de comportamiento entre los municipios, lo que se refleja en cuatro de trayectorias de desarrollo en el país. En éstas se observa que si bien algunos municipios aumentaron su nivel de competencia política, en la gran mayoría del país éste se mantuvo estable, mientras que en otros, contrario a lo esperado, la competencia política disminuyó significativamente a partir de las reformas de democratización. Estos resultados indican que el régimen político presenta variaciones a nivel subnacional en su dimensión de competencia política que no dependen exclusivamente de la intencionalidad y objetivos que tienen las reformas nacionales.

En este trabajo se identifican los distintos grados de institucionalización legislativa y transparencia en congresos locales de México, desde la perspectiva comparada. El objetivo general es contribuir al estado de conocimiento de la ciencia política sobre el desempeño institucional de las legislaturas subnacionales y explicar cómo el proceso de democratización afecta el rendimiento en materia de institucionalización y transparencia en ese nivel.

The state occupies a central place in the study of a range of political, economic, and social outcomes. This article brings into dialogue literature on the state and emerging research on criminal politics through a study of protection rackets. Conceiving of criminal protection rackets as institutional arrangements of extraction and domination, I develop a political economy framework to explain variation in forms of resistance to rackets. The framework shows that distinct configurations of economic and political resources influence the type of resistance available to subordinates. I illustrate the framework's utility using micro-level data on resistance to rackets in Latin America. Attention to how resource endowments shape patterns of resistance to projects of extraction and domination provides a novel window into the bottom-up dynamics of state building.

This article analyses the relation between mineral rents and development outcomes at the subnational level. The classical literature suggests that natural resource abundance has negative effects on well-being, a situation referred to as the resource curse. However, a novel strand of research emphasizes that rentier states worldwide exhibit contrasting outcomes. To account for such variation, this investigation aligns with approaches stressing the significance of contextual (place and institutional) factors to studying the resource curse. The main claim in this work is that both structural and institutional factors related to the extractive industry help account for variation in development outcomes. It contends that mineral rents are positively associated with human development and economic industrialization when the extractive sector is not geographically concentrated in enclave economies, and subnational fiscal institutions redistribute enough rents from producing to non-producing districts. It empirically tests this argument using a time series cross-sectional analysis, a difference-in-difference (DiD) estimation, and two case studies in Argentina, a country where subnational territorial units collect mineral royalties and have exogenously created their own rent-sharing regimes. It finally provides some comparative implications that may contribute to current debates on the socioeconomic impact of natural resource wealth.

Comparative research on the arts councils of three sub-national regions from different countries, Catalonia (Spain), Jalisco (Mexico) and Scotland (United Kingdom), is carried out to examine the application of the arm's length principle, its performance, its relation to the cultural and politic context and its inclusion in institutional systems other than the Anglo-Saxon system. With a qualitative methodology and case study strategy, fieldwork is performed in each place through interviews, observations and documentary work, applying the joint canon of agreement and difference for analysis. The conclusion reached is that an arts council is not necessarily a body under the arm's length principle and the influence that stakeholders seek to exert through their various resources is reflected upon. The relationship between arts councils and their context shows the dialectics between legitimacy/efficiency, transparency/clientelism and differentiation/standardisation, and the tensions between the centre/periphery. This principle is used from politics as a rhetorical argument, while the aim is to have more control over decisions, even though this increases the level of accountability. The cultural sector is unaware that the principle also seeks to keep its distance from it to avoid clientelism. There is an evident mimicry, copying foreign models without adapting them sufficiently to the context and without delving more deeply into external experiences and theoretical reflections, which reveals some mistakes of the process.

A ciência política brasileira dá provas de seu amadurecimento nesta contribuição seminal à análise institucional em Pernambuco. As instituições estaduais são submetidas, a quatro mãos, a rigoroso escrutínio a partir de uma dupla chave: empírica e analítica. Da primeira e do olhar atento ao contexto político, este livro extrai conclusões contundentes sobre a escassa institucionalidade dos poderes constituídos no estado. Na segunda, o legislativo mostra-se frágil e capitulado frente ao poder executivo, e este último revela-se hipertrofiado e debilmente controlado pelos demais poderes. Se as instituições são marcadas por fragilidades importantes e por escassa accountability, a sociedade e a vida política no estado exibem, teimosamente, alguma virtú.  É no elevado pluralismo político e na forte contestabilidade, que residem a singularidade do estado. É neles que os autores localizam a semente da mudança.
Marcus André Melo
Professor do Dep. de Ciência Política da UFPE

The inclusion of subnational parliaments into the early warning system (EWS) for subsidiarity control generates transforming dynamics in parliamentary modus operandi in
European Union (EU) decentralized states. Empirical findings reveal considerable variations in the pace and scope of subnational parliamentary activity in EU policy control challenging the existing theories of territorial mobilization. Drawing from a comparative institutional analysis, this article offers a theoretical framework that permits accounting for cross-country variations in subnational parliamentary mobilization in EU affairs, under the EWS. By placing an increased focus on the domestic environment, it suggests that the two important factors which might affect the scope of parliamentary activity are (1) the relationship
between the executive and legislature at the subnational level, and (2) the position of the regional executive in domestic governance arrangements.

With the return of Executive Elections in Russia, regional electoral contestation becomes an important arena for regime power and opposition activity.  My current research shows that the key to the Kremlin's candidates winning big majorities in gubernatorial & big city mayoral elections (as opposed to simply stuffing the ballot box) is not kicking opposition candidates off the ballot, but somehow getting them to forgo even the attempt to get on the ballot in the first place.  In those few cases where they actually attempt to get on the ballot, they usually succeed and run very close elections, and in a few cases (mayors of Yaroslavl, Yekaterinburg, Novosibirsk), even win.

Resumen | Las políticas de desgravaciones y ventajas impositivas para la relocalización de empresas son una constante en todo el mundo como una forma de promover el desarrollo económico en territorios desfavorecidos. En el caso de Argentina se canalizaron mediante un régimen de promoción industrial regional que otorgó subsidios para relocalizar empresas en provincias económicamente deprimidas. Este artículo muestra cómo el gobierno de una provincia caracterizada como patrimonialista, San Luis, transformó su estructura productiva en un plazo de 10 años (1982-1992), al radicar una cantidad ingente de industrias en su territorio. Mediante la técnica de process tracing y una serie de entrevistas en profundidad se argumenta que el gobierno realizó una delegación informal de competencias burocráticas a un agente no institucionalizado, con la finalidad de que realice tareas que el aparato estatal no tenía capacidad de llevar a cabo y, de esa manera, promover la llegada de las inversiones a su territorio.

This book analyzes the verticalization of coalition cabinets from the national to the sub-national level. Presenting case studies for countries with federal systems of government, such as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, and India, as well as those focusing on states with hybrid systems of government, such as Italy, the contributors analyze multilevel government formation processes to identify vertical congruence between national and sub-national coalitions. The book also examines various factors affecting the degree of congruence of political coalitions, such as the degree of decentralization, federalization and institutionalization of political systems, as well as cleavage structure. This book will be a valuable resource for all scholars interested in coalition politics, as well as for politicians and practitioners in government and parliament.

Inequality is unequally distributed across the territory, and national averages obscure this variation. Pockets of very high inequality persist at the subnational level of government, even when national governments implement large scale redistributive policies. This study investigates which factors at the subnational level may help explaining differences in income inequality across units. The main claim is that in subnational units where local economic elites capture provincial states by occupying relevant positions in their governments have lower taxes on land, spend less in social programs, have more repression of federal labor rights, and, as a consequence, have higher inequality. The study uses a large-N analysis of original panel data for Argentina, presents a comparative study of two cases, and explores some comparative implications in the conclusions.

This paper explores how governors' political objectives affect the distribution of public resources by state governments in Mexico. State and regional governments control significant shares of public spending in many Latin American countries, often with weak oversight. Nevertheless, most studies of intergovernmental transfers examine decision making at the federal level, providing only a partial picture of fiscal arrangements in federal systems. Using panel data from 1,748 Mexican municipalities between 1989 and 2013, this paper examines the political determinants of revenue transfers from state governments to their constituent municipalities in Mexico. I find that municipalities with more competitive elections and those governed by politicians from the governor's party receive larger transfers. However, there are notable differences across time and space. The effect of political variables is stronger in rural municipalities and during periods when a state's overall political competition is increasing. Taken together, these findings suggest the manipulation of revenue transfers is primarily a strategy of governors to counter opposition gains by supporting political allies in rural jurisdictions.

Este artículo presenta una discusión teórica sobre las formas de clasificar la democracia subnacional de acuerdo con autores que han examinado el tema en América Latina. La discusión evidencia los límites e imprecisiones que tienen la mayoría de conceptos para aprehender conceptual y empíricamente el cambio en el tiempo de las variaciones de la democracia subnacional y propone el concepto de trayectorias de desarrollo para estudiar este fenómeno. Dicho concepto se testea de manera empírica por medio del estudio de caso de la democracia subnacional en Colombia, comparando la forma agregada de estudiar la democracia colombiana que se ha realizado en distintas investigaciones sobre la materia y el group-based trajectory modeling,el cual permite observar que el desarrollo de la democracia subnacional en Colombia ha sido heterogéneo y se caracteriza por tener distintas trayectorias de apertura y estabilidad en el ámbito local.

What is the effect of political competition on subnational social spending? Using descriptive statistics and regression models for original budget panel data for the 24 Argentine provinces between 1993 and 2009, the study finds that social spending increases the more electorally secure governors are and the longer they have been in office. It also finds that other arguments in the literature are relevant in explaining variations on types of spending, such as partisan fragmentation in the districts. The article discusses these findings for the Argentine provinces and explores their implications with regard to the debates on the effects of electoral competition and the design of social policies, especially in developing countries and federal democracies.

This is the introductory chapter and analytical framework for the book "Different Resources, Different Conflicts? The Subnational Political Economy of Armed Conflict and Crime in Colombia". The book explores some of the risks for sustainable peace in Colombia. It intentionally stirs away from an emphasis on the drug trade as the main resource fueling Colombian conflicts and violence, a topic that has dominated scholarly attention. Instead, it focuses on the links that have been formed through decades of armed conflict between legal resources—such as bananas, coffee, coal, flowers, gold, ferronickel, emerald, and oil—, conflict dynamics, and crime in several Colombian regions. In this way, the book contributes to a growing trend in the academic literature focusing on the sub-national level of armed conflict behaviors. It also illustrates how the social and economic contexts these resources are embedded in can operate as buffers or as drivers of violence. The book thus provides important lessons for policymakers and scholars alike. Just as resources have been linked to outbreaks and transformations of violence, peacebuilding, too, needs to take into account their impacts, legacies, and potential.

La bibliografía sobre variaciones democráticas a nivel subnacional incluye un buen número de estudios sobre provincias (y sus equivalentes en otros países), pero muy pocos sobre municipios (Benton 2016; Sznek 2015). La intención de esta investigación es indagar sobre variaciones en las democracias municipales salteñas (1987-2015). El trabajo consta de dos partes: un estudio de caso y una parte estadística. El estudio es del tipo exploratorio, descriptivo y explicativo. Exploratorio porque se realizó un estudio de caso en el municipio de General Ballivián donde se buscaron explorar nuevas explicaciones sobre los regímenes municipales; descriptivo porque se realizó a través de un estudio estadístico una medición efectiva de la democracia municipal en todos los municipios de Salta; y explicativo porque se buscaron hallar las causas de estas variaciones democráticas entre municipios.

This chapter provides a review of the uneven processes and multiple pathways associated with localized illiberal structures and practices in large federal democracies, addresses the comparative and analytical challenges arising from this approach, and points to some fruitful directions for further investigation.Here we develop a framework of three pathways toward subnational democratization that is inductively derived from the case studies in this volume. Our framework includes the possibility of top-down democratization from the center but also of bottom-up processes that originate at the subnational level.Fil: Whitehead, Laurence. University of Oxford; Reino UnidoFil: Behrend, Jacqueline Mariela. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de San Martín. Escuela de Política y Gobierno; Argentin

This paper examines the determinants of reelection of parties and mayors in Argentine local elections during the 1983-2011 period. Using a unique and comprehensive database recording local elecion results for over 1200 local governments, we test three potential sources of variation: structural factors, polítical/institutional variables and economic variables. We find that incumbency advantage is strongly and significantly related with a higher probability of reelection. We also find some evidence supporting the economic voting hypothesis, that local economic conditions are relevant for explaining re-election of local governments. We also find that local governments where parties and mayors have been in office for a long time have greater re-election chances. Finally, we find that governments with municipal charters have lower probability of reelection. Summing up, there seems to be both economic and politico-institucional factors behind re-election rates of parties and mayors in Argentine local governments.

La bibliografía sobre variaciones democráticas a nivel subnacional incluye un buen número de estudios sobre provincias (y sus equivalentes en otros países), pero muy pocos sobre municipios (Benton 2016; Sznek 2015). La intención de esta investigación es indagar sobre variaciones en las democracias municipales salteñas (1987-2015). El trabajo consta de dos partes: un estudio de caso y una parte estadística. El estudio es del tipo exploratorio, descriptivo y explicativo. Exploratorio porque se realizó un estudio de caso en el municipio de General Ballivián donde se buscaron explorar nuevas explicaciones sobre los regímenes municipales; descriptivo porque se realizó a través de un estudio estadístico una medición efectiva de la democracia municipal en todos los municipios de Salta; y explicativo porque se buscaron hallar las causas de estas variaciones democráticas entre municipios.

This article investigates the electorally expressed ideology of Brazilian voters via ecological analysis at the municipal level between 1994 and 2018. Our purpose is to analyze the main conditioners of aggregated patterns of ideology measured at a high spatial resolution. We test four major explanations for the variation in ideology at the municipal level: the effect of incumbent alignments, social modernization, political pluralism, and social inclusion. We find that although the Brazilian electorate as a whole leans to the right, there has been a ‘gravitational effect’ exerted by presidential incumbents over local ideology, and during the PT years this was visible in municipal outcomes. However, the vast majority of municipalities tended to the right even during the period of PT national government. During the late Dilma Rousseff years there was a return to a more conservative vote-revealed ideology at the local level, with a sharper veer to the right in the 2016 municipal and 2018 federal elections under Michel Temer. Overall, when we examine local voting in PR elections, we observe that there was no durable electoral realignment in the period under study.

Статья посвящена количественной оценке демократии в контексте политической динамики посткоммунистических стран на субнациональном (региональном) уровне. Цель статьи – предложить расчетный индекс, позволяющий оценить демократические и авторитарные тенденции посткоммунистического перехода в России на региональном уровне, в частности, проверить гипо- тезу Н. Петрова о частичной демократизации авторитарных региональных режимов в первой половине 2000-х гг. Описана структура индекса, его теоре- тическое обоснование (концепции Р. Даля, Т. Ванханена, Г. Алмонда и С. Вербы, А. Хиршмана), методика расчета, основные результаты и выводы для периода 1990–2010-х гг. На примере Украины обсуждаются возможности и ограничения индекса для анализа других посткоммунистических стран.

El objetivo de este artículo es contribuir a la creciente literatura sobre la nacionalización de los partidos políticos y los sistemas de partidos, para aclarar su terminología y evaluar tres índices propuestos para la medición del fenómeno recientemente usados en América Latina. Se argumenta que pese a la confusión terminológica, la nacionalización debería definirse como la homogeneidad de los apoyos electorales en el territorio y que una medida adecuada debería tomar en cuenta cuatro elementos: presencia del partido a lo largo del país, el número de unidades subnacionales donde se mide, su magnitud y el tamaño del partido. La revisión de la literatura sobre América Latina revela que se necesitan más estudios de la evolución en el tiempo, las explicaciones de sus cambios y variables centradas en los partidos.

This chapter offers a comparative historical analysis of the nature and scope of variations in political rights at the subnational level in the worlds six largest federal democracies--Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States in the Americas, as well as India and Russia--thus covering federations that underwent democratic transitions in the first, second, and third waves of democratization. The aim is to demonstrate and explain the marked divergences in the extent and quality of political rights held by citizens in different subunits of these democracies. There is a growing literature on the persistence after the transition to democracy of illiberal or authoritarian politics at the subnational level that has emphasized the uneven spread of democratic practices in different federal states. It shows that the existence of brown areas (O Donnell 1993), authoritarian enclaves (Gibson 2012; Mickey 2015), or closed games (Behrend 2011) lead to the partial or incomplete application o...

This book analyzes the verticalization of coalition cabinets from the national to the sub-national level. Presenting case studies for countries with federal systems of government, such as Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Germany, and India, as well as those focusing on states with hybrid systems of government, such as Italy, the contributors analyze multilevel government formation processes to identify vertical congruence between national and sub-national coalitions. The book also examines various factors affecting the degree of congruence of political coalitions, such as the degree of decentralization, federalization and institutionalization of political systems, as well as cleavage structure. This book will be a valuable resource for all scholars interested in coalition politics, as well as for politicians and practitioners in government and parliament.