By: Julian Michel, Ph.D. in Political Science from UCLA, Postdoctoral Fellow at LMU Munich
The following blog post summarizes the research that won the Midwest Political Science Association’s Kellogg/Notre Dame Award for the best comparative politics paper presented at the 2024 MPSA Annual Conference.
Democratic backsliding is widely perceived as a key challenge of our time. In contrast to the often-invoked image of “the executive” undermining other branches of government, backsliding typically unfolds under multi-level governance. In over 89% of democratic country-years between 1990 and 2021, executive authority is allocated in both national and subnational elections. Thus, presidents and prime ministers who consider eroding democracy face opposition-led governor- and mayorships to varying extents. This raises the question: Does opposition party access to subnational governments matter for whether the national executive can undermine democracy?
Prominent resistance to backsliding often emerges from opposition governors and mayors. Under the second Trump presidency, Democrat-led governorships have been characterized as a “firewall” and “last line of defense” against Trump. Similarly, subnational opposition to backsliding in Poland, Turkey, India and a range of Latin American countries may support that subnational executive offices are meaningful resources in national-level regime change. However, it is challenging to isolate the effects of opposition-led governor- and mayorships. First, more popular opposition parties should win more subnational offices but can be expected to better resist backsliding for many reasons unrelated to subnational control. Second, the most comprehensive dataset on subnational election outcomes covers only 30 out of 106 politically decentralized democracies after 1990.
To address these empirical challenges, I assembled the Subnational Elections Database which covers the share of highest subnational executive offices won by party in regular subnational election years (84 democracies, 1990-2021). It also offers disaggregated data on vote shares, candidates and subnational electoral system design for 371 states in 18 Latin American democracies. Further, I employ a close-election discontinuity design and different panel models to identify the effects of opposition control over subnational governments.
In terms of theoretical framework, I argue in this paper that opposition parties – even in unitary and unicameral democracies – are better able to constrain the national executive when they control more subnational governments. This is for at least two reasons: First, subnational governments provide access to resources that opposition parties can leverage to perform better in subsequent elections. Such resources include budgets, hiring opportunities and political visibility. Even before the next elections, subnational governments as “electoral springboards” help opposition parties incentivize their office-seeking MPs to take an assertive stance in their exercise of horizontal accountability. Second, unaligned subnational governments amplify the national executive’s principal-agent problems when attempting to weaponize the state to punish opponents.
Empirically, I use panel models and data from 84 democracies (1990-2021) to show that horizontal oversight of the national executive increases after subnational elections in which opposition parties gain more subnational control. Further, I leverage V-Dem data on the national executive’s constitutional violations and find that subnational opposition access is negatively correlated with this form of executive aggrandizement. Crucially, both results hold when excluding federal or bicameral democracies where state governments may affect horizontal oversight via the national upper chamber. When disaggregating the measure of horizontal oversight, I find that the results are driven by legislative as opposed to judicial oversight. To demonstrate that subnational governments are electoral springboards, I employ a close-election discontinuity design with data from 18 Latin American democracies. It shows that opposition parties that marginally won highest subnational executive office gain 12-17 percentage points higher vote shares in the next national legislative elections than those that marginally lost.
Overall, these findings suggest that subnational control matters for national democratic stability. While opposition-led states can at times be “laboratories against democracy” (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Grumbach 2022), they have on average been sources of democratic stability after the Cold War. Currently, I am extending this research in a book project and multiple follow-up studies. The underlying Subnational Elections Database will be made publicly available upon publication of the main research outputs.