The origins of subnational democracy: how colonial legacies and labor incorporation shaped regime heterogeneity within Latin American countries

Pérez Sandoval, J

Thesis

The origins of subnational democracy: how colonial legacies and labor incorporation shaped regime heterogeneity within Latin American countries

Abstract:: Despite recent contributions, subnational democratic variation has received little systematic attention in comparative politics and continues to be a grave omission (Dahl 1971, 12) in the literature on democratization. Moreover, current explanations are at fault of ignoring the intricacies of time. Consequently, our understanding of the regime heterogeneity observed within countries has hitherto remained ahistorical. To overcome this and other limitations, using evidence from the largest federations of Latin America, I put forth the first comparative, and historically grounded explanation of the origins of subnational democracy.

The project tackles the following question: What explains subnational democratic variation across Latin America? In other words, why is it that some provinces within countries are more democratic than others? I contend that economic development is at the core of the puzzle. More specifically, building on the work of Mahoney (2010) and Collier and Collier (1991), I articulate a two-step argument contending that, across the region, the subnational unevenness observed today was configured by territorially distinct development trajectories which were triggered during colonization and that, once set, conditioned the timing of local labor incorporation.

My two-step, path-dependent argument is bound by a probabilistic notion of causality. Empirically, I adopt a mixed-methods approach. Weaving together quantitative and qualitative evidence, I present original data for all the subnational units of Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. In addition, I track the experiences of Jalisco, Rio Grande do Sul, Guerrero, and Salta, as cases that illustrate the processes at play. I conclude this project by exploring the portability of my argument to the Indian case. My cross-national, longitudinal, and historical exploration of the origins of subnational democracy contributes to the discipline by contextualizing all other existing explanations of subnational regime variation.

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APA Style

Pérez Sandoval, J. (2021). The origins of subnational democracy: how colonial legacies and labor incorporation shaped regime heterogeneity within Latin American countries [PhD thesis]. University of Oxford.

MLA Style

Pérez Sandoval, J. The Origins of Subnational Democracy: How Colonial Legacies and Labor Incorporation Shaped Regime Heterogeneity within Latin American Countries. University of Oxford, 2021.

Chicago Style

Pérez Sandoval, J. 2021. “The Origins of Subnational Democracy: How Colonial Legacies and Labor Incorporation Shaped Regime Heterogeneity within Latin American Countries.” PhD thesis, University of Oxford.
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