Fragmented Latin American Urban Democracy (FLAUD)

• In Event: City Limits and Urban Democracy: Through a Comparative Lens

Abstract

Contemporaneous democratization and decentralization in Latin America in the 1980s divided residents of large metropolitan areas into a numerous politico-administrative districts in both federal and unitary countries. While there is much debate on the effects of decentralization on representation in cities, two fundamental questions have yet to be answered: how fragmented are cities in Latin America? And what exactly is being fragmented when new districts are created, or old ones are divided? This paper introduces the Fragmented Latin American Urban Democracy (FLAUD) dataset which measures the degree and nature of administrative, electoral, and policy-based fragmentation in over 1,000 cities in the region. It identifies all administrative units and electoral districts that intersect each metropolitan area, weighted by the relative proportion of urban residents in each district, and generates novel estimates of urban concentration and fragmentation. It codes the administrative tiers that are relevant for all major elections in each country, characterizing whether the electorates in those districts are predominantly urban or rural, and how concentrated is the urban population across cities therein. Finally, FLAUD codes the core policy competencies allocated to representatives in those tiers—using both qualitative and fiscal data—to identify whether some policy areas are more or less fragmented than others within the same city. The resulting dataset facilitates identification of cases where coherent urban policy may be impeded by excessive or insufficient metropolitan decentralization. Using a decade of survey responses from the Latin American Public Opinion Project, census demographics, and multilevel regression with poststratification, I assess the consequences of urban fragmentation on citizen satisfaction with local democracy and service provision at the city level.

Author

• Noah Schouela, University of Chicago