It often seems that decentralization and democratization go hand in hand. As part of the “third wave” of democratization, popular elections were introduced for provincial and local governments that had formerly been appointed, and responsibilities and expenditures were transferred to those subnational governments. More recently, local elections have been introduced even in China, where authoritarianism is firmly entrenched at the national level.
In Hybrid Regimes within Democracies, Carlos Gervasoni, however, demonstrates that decentralization and democracy do not always go together. In a study of provincial governments in Argentina, he documents that, in contrast to the Chinese experience, a form of authoritarianism can survive at the provincial level in spite of national-level democracy. In fact, he argues that nondemocratic practices nurtured at the provincial level can even spill over to national-level politics. In an era of democratic “backsliding” around the world, this is a timely book.
In the provincial quasi-authoritarian enclaves described by Gervasoni, elections are not canceled, nor are opposition politicians and journalists jailed or killed. Rather, in a heavy-handed form of machine politics, provincial governments exert far-reaching control over the local economy, which is dominated by the public sector. They can deny jobs, contracts, or licenses to potential dissenters and silence any potential opposition in the local media. They can stack the judiciary and government agencies with loyalists and manipulate electoral institutions to their advantage. As a result, the governing party faces little opposition and few institutional checks on its power, which leads to a corrupt and venal form of governance that does not serve the public interest.
This phenomenon is not evenly distributed across Argentina’s provinces. The main goal of Gervasoni’s book is to measure and then explain this rather pronounced variation in (non)-democratic practices. This larger question is of considerable interest beyond Argentina. There is clearly a similar type of variation in democratic practices and competition across Brazilian, Mexican, and Indian states. Students of US politics who pick up Gervasoni’s book will immediately be reminded of the work of V. O. Key and Robert Mickey on the era of one-party governance in the Solid South, as well as accounts of the era of machine politics in US cities. And observers of contemporary US politics will inevitably think of recent challenges to democracy in US states like North Carolina.
To explain the heterogeneity he observes in Argentina, Gervasoni turns to an explanation drawn from what Barry Weingast has called the “fiscal interest” approach to political economy. He argues that, to understand authoritarian enclaves in Argentina, we must understand the revenue structure of Argentinian federalism. Small, peripheral provinces are dramatically overrepresented in the federal legislature, and they receive extremely generous intergovernmental transfers, which are funded by the most economically developed handful of provinces—above all, Buenos Aires and the Pampas. Governments in the favored peripheral provinces are extremely transfer dependent, and the provincial public sector dominates the local economy. The jobs and contracts over which the provincial government presides are highly desirable. This provides the provincial government with great discretion to punish its enemies and reward its supporters and leaves it with few incentives to promote entrepreneurship or foster productive relationships with the private sector to raise tax revenue.
In Gervasoni’s account, intergovernmental transfers play the same role as natural resource rents in the literature on rentier states in oil-rich countries or foreign aid in the literature on the perils of aid dependence. He shows that there is less political competition, and nondemocratic practices are more widespread, in provinces with the highest levels of transfer dependence.
Gervasoni’s basic claim about Argentina is clear and convincing, and he supports it with a wealth of detailed quantitative and qualitative data. Federal transfers facilitate a form of machine politics that would probably not be possible were provincial officials required to fund their expenditures through local taxation.
A reader who is new to Argentinian federalism may ask: how is this extreme overrepresentation of the periphery, and the accompanying transfer of wealth from the economic core, politically sustainable? Of course, one can ask the same thing about the United States. In both cases, one may answer that the rules of the game were determined by a constitutional bargain struck in the distant past. Gervasoni’s implicit claim is that because the bargain was struck long ago and is difficult to undo, provincial transfer dependence today can be seen as essentially exogenous.
However, it is possible that the ongoing maintenance of that bargain is an untold part of the story. Some of the small provinces were created by Juan Peron to enhance his party’s representation. Perhaps voters in the periphery of Argentina still see Peronist candidates as tireless advocate for their interests, and this may be part of the explanation for the overwhelming victories of these candidates in both federal and provincial elections in the transfer-dependent provinces. A closely related alternative explanation is that voters simply reward incumbents for their public expenditures: large provincial victories for incumbents in the periphery can be interpreted as rewards for success in the game of pork-barrel politics as much as evidence of democratic deficit. This argument has been made, for instance, about transfers and incumbent success in Brazilian states and municipalities.
More generally, it is important to keep in mind that provincial elections in federations may be influenced by national partisan politics. For instance, we should probably not conclude that Wyoming and California are less Democratic than North Carolina because they are dominated by a single party. Surely the dominance of the Republicans in Wyoming has to do with the fact that its voters are relatively conservative on the national ideological spectrum, and voters in the small, sparsely populated states of the US periphery vote for Republicans in part because the party is viewed as an advocate for their interests vis-à-vis those of the large coastal cities.
Gervasoni is well aware of the distinction between competitiveness and democracy; indeed, one of the book’s strengths is its close attention to measurement. In one chapter, his measure of provincial democracy is essentially a measure of political competition and government turnover. In another chapter, he takes a different approach, relying on a detailed expert survey to elucidate actual perversions of the democratic process, such as manipulation of the judiciary and electoral institutions or attacks on the media. An advantage of the former type of measurement is that it requires no interpretation or discretionary coding. An advantage of the latter is that it corresponds more closely to his theory. In any case, he goes on to show that low levels of competition and affronts to democracy are highly correlated across Argentinian provinces.
But this may not be the case elsewhere. For instance, some of the most noteworthy antidemocratic skullduggery in recent years seems be taking place in some of the most competitive US states like North Carolina. Thus, comparative scholars wishing to use Gervasoni’s book as a guide to a broader inquiry into subnational democracy will probably want to follow up on his labor-intensive efforts to track the actual practices of subnational governments rather than opting, as he seems to recommend in the book’s penultimate chapter, for the shortcut of measuring electoral competitiveness.
Finally, the book provides rather little speculation about the general conditions under which we should expect the correlation between fiscal flows and nondemocratic practices to occur. The concentration of economic activity in Buenos Aires and the extent of transfer dependence and public sector dominance in the small provinces of the Argentinian periphery are rather extreme in comparative perspective. It is not clear whether we should expect similar authoritarian tendencies in, for instance, Wyoming or Mississippi, the relatively transfer-dependent Canadian Maritime provinces, local governments in the south of Italy, or, for that matter, among subnational governments in much of Africa, where local taxation is often minimal. Perhaps it is the case that extremely high absolute levels of transfer dependence and public sector dominance are required for the argument to work or that there are some other unspecified scope conditions; for instance, relating to levels of discretion in local public procurement and hiring.
These scope conditions are important, because the book raises some interesting and perhaps disquieting questions about the future of subnational democracy in the era of globalization and increased geographic concentration of wealth. As private sector jobs disappear outside of knowledge-economy hubs, the public sector has become responsible for large and increasing shares of employment in the economic peripheries of many countries, and these public sector jobs are often subsidized by transfers from the urbanized economic core. Schools, public hospitals, nursing homes, and local governments are already the largest employers in many rural areas. If this trend continues, other countries may come to look more like Argentina in the years ahead on the key dimensions explored by Gervasoni. If his argument applies broadly, one might worry that economic divergence across regions will be associated with divergence in democratic practices within countries.
