Multilevel Governance and the Subnational Turn in Latin America

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The purpose of this panel is to illustrate the critical importance of subnational actors to APSA’s 2024 conference theme, which focuses on both the retrenchment of democracy that is taking place around the world as well as the practices and institutions that might renovate democracy. In Latin America, territorialized actors below the nation-state are shaping the prospects for democratic governance in powerful new ways. As a region that experienced transitions from authoritarian rule to liberal democratic governance in the 1980s and 90s, recent decades have witnessed the persistence of subnational authoritarian enclaves in various countries, but also innovative new reforms at the subnational level that promise to expand and enhance democratic participation “from below.” Understanding democracy in Latin America requires a multilevel approach as struggles over the terms of democratic governance will increasingly be fought across myriad subnational territories and not just at the national level of the political system.

The panel highlights recent work that challenges the traditional tendency in comparative politics (including in Latin America) to privilege what happens within national capitals by shifting the analytical focus downward to subnational spheres of governance and intergovernmental relations. The papers in the panel show that greater scholarly attention to the territorial nature of politics holds the keys for understanding some of the most politically salient and substantively important dynamics that are now unfolding in the region. These include the legal recognition of indigenous communities (Falleti and Unzueta), conflicts over the extraction of natural resources and the use of prior consultation mechanisms (Edenhofer), the logic of political business cycles at the municipal and state level (Benton), and the prospects for free and fair elections and election monitoring (Baez and Eaton). Taken together, the papers also demonstrate that the use of territorial lenses is critical not just in large federal countries (like Argentina and Mexico) but in smaller unitary cases as well (such as Guatemala and Honduras).

Sub Unit

• Division 28: Federalism and Intergovernmental Relations

Individual Presentations

• Subnational Political Budget Cycles in Mexico - Allyson L. Benton, University of Essex

• The Timing of Indigenous Communities’ Legal Recognition: Argentina, 1978-2022 - Tulia G. Falleti, University of Pennsylvania; M Belen Unzueta

• Local Democracy and Elite Backlash: Mining Battles in Guatemala and Honduras - Nathan Edenhofer

• Recentralization in Mexico: Reconfiguring Intergovernmental Relations - Kent Eaton, University of California, Santa Cruz; Omar Baez, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)

Chair

• Kent Eaton University of California, Santa Cruz

Discussants

• Kent Eaton University of California, Santa Cruz

• Allyson L. Benton University of Essex