Author Meets Critics: “Hybrid Regimes within Democracies” by Carlos Gervasoni

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

Subnational regimes are a recent but fast-developing area of research in comparative politics. As the third wave of democratization spread around the world, it became increasingly clear that the racially-segregated, single-party “Jim Crow” US South had not been an anomaly: in many parts of the world national democracies coexist, often in harmony, with subnational units that are far less democratic. Few books, however, have focused on how political rights and freedoms vary across the states and provinces of national-level democracies.

This “Author Meets Critics” panel brings together five noted scholars of political regimes and the author to discuss "Hybrid Regimes within Democracies: Fiscal Federalism and Subnational Rentier States" (Cambridge University Press, 2018), the first comprehensive study of democracy and authoritarianism in all the subnational units of a federal country, Argentina. The book includes a comprehensive description of subnational regimes (Part I: Description), proposes and tests a novel explanation for significant variance in levels of provincial democracy (Part II: Explanation), and compares the Argentine provinces with the regions of seven other countries (Part III: Comparison).

Some contributions to the field of subnational regimes include: a) methodological innovations in the measurement of democracy at the regional level, b) an in-depth and multidimensional account of provincial regimes in Argentina, based on both quantitative and qualitative indicators, c) the finding that the least democratic units are hybrid regimes rather than authoritarian ones, and d) an original theory that sees central-government transfers to regions as causally equivalent to natural resource rents. In developing this last point, the book integrates the influential literatures on the rentier state (or the “political resource course”) and on fiscal federalism, extending the rentier-state explanatory logic from resource rents to a more general concept, that of “fiscal rents,” and from the national to the subnational level. Finally, the book proposes a methodology to measure subnational democracy across countries, and applies it to compare the regions of Argentina, Australia, Canada, Germany, India, Mexico, the USA and Uruguay.

The presenters will critically assess these contributions, and will relate the book’s concepts, measurement strategies, theoretical framework, causal mechanisms, and conclusions –mostly developed for or derived from subnational cases– to current general debates in political science about democracy (its measurement and causes), hybrid regimes, the political resource curse, and the political effects of different types of fiscal federalism institutions.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 44: Comparative Democratization

Chair

• Michael L. Ross University of California, Los Angeles

Presenters

• Michael J. Coppedge University of Notre Dame

• Steven Levitsky Harvard University

• Scott Mainwaring Kellogg Institute

• Kelly M. McMann Case Western Reserve University

• Carlos Gervasoni Universidad Torcuato Di Tella