The Urban Threat: Municipal Politics and Authoritarianism

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

Authoritarian leaders depend on local governors and mayors to govern territories that are difficult for the leader to monitor. In the absence of effective elections, the autocrat selects local officials to serve as their agent, tasking them with implementing national policy objectives, monitoring local public opinion, and gathering information on or effectively quelling sources of local unrest. Critically, effective local agents can generate support for the regime while eliminating potentially contagious contention and opposition before it becomes a national problem. At the same time, local officials do not blindly pursue state objectives; they also advance personal goals of office retention, promotion, and personal enrichment. This panel brings together four papers on urban political dynamics in Russia and China, two large autocracies, to examine the effects of local officials’ need to balance national policy objectives, local governance issues, the autocrat’s priorities, and their personal goals..

The first paper, by Sean Norton, utilizes municipal election results in Moscow, Russia to demonstrate that authoritarian municipal policy drives complex voting patterns that are distinct from those observed at the national level and that can lead to surprising gains for opposition politicians. The second paper, by Sasha de Vogel, considers how local officials strategically combine repression and concession when responding to local socio-economic protests, and draws on an original dataset of protests and their outcomes in Moscow, Russia from 2013-2018. In the third paper, Howard Liu identifies how social protest in China reflects the intensity of subnational elite competition: as cadres exploit local resources to outperform their competition and win promotions, they generate social grievances that have non-linear effects on local competition. Finally the fourth paper, by Diana Fu and Christian Goebel, examines a nationally representative sample of letters to the mayors of Chinese cities to determine the extent to which national-level propaganda campaigns penetrate local political rhetoric and communications.

Jeremy Wallace (2013, 2014) and Robert Bates (1981) have established that cities, as potential tinderboxes of collective action, represent a significant threat to the durability of authoritarian regimes. This panel pursues the relationship between cities and authoritarian durability further, exploring how local authoritarian leaders succeed or fail in managing the contentious and electoral threats cities pose. Taken together, these papers demonstrate that factors impacting the stability of authoritarian systems are rooted in a lower level of governance than conventionally studied.

Sub Unit

• DIVISION 11: Comparative Politics

Individual Presentations

• Local Voters, Local Issues?: Municipal Electoral Behavior under Authoritarianism - Sean Norton, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

• Local Officials’ Response to Local Socio-Economic Protest in Authoritarian - Sasha de Vogel, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

• Everyday Transcripts in China: Transformations under Xi - Diana Fu, University of Toronto; Christian Goebel, University of Vienna

• The Art of Not Governing: Local Politics and Party Cooptation in Postwar Lebanon - Christiana Moreira Parreira, Stanford University

Chair

• Sasha de Vogel University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Discussants

• Ora John Reuter University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

• Jeremy L. Wallace Cornell University