Land tenure regimes and state structure in rural Africa: implications for forms of resistance to large-scale land acquisitions by outsiders

This paper argues for seeing African land tenure regimes as institutional configurations that have been defined and redefined as part of state-building projects. Land regimes have built state authority in the rural areas, fixed populations in rural territories, and organised rural society into political collectivities subject to central control. Land tenure regimes can be understood as varying across subnational jurisdictions (rather than as invariant across space) in ways that can be grasped in terms of a conceptual distinction between neo-customary and statist forms (rather than as infinitely diverse). Differences between the two have implications for the character of political authority in the rural areas, the nature of political identities and community structure, and the nature of property and land claims. These political effects are visible in differences in the forms of local protest and resistance to commercial land acquisitions in peri-urban Kumasi, Ghana, where a neo-customary land regime prevails, and the Kiru Valley of northern Tanzania, where land institutions are decidedly statist.     

Do Provincial Governors Control National Legislators? Quasi-Experimental Evidence of Argentine Federalism

Do governors control the behaviour of legislators from their provinces and parties in the national congress? The aim of the article is to test gubernatorial subnational political influence on national legislators. I first discuss the problems of the logic behind empirical exercises that measure the legislative influence of governors. Then the study tests gubernatorial influence using quasi-experimental evidence from Argentina, a federalism that bears all the hallmarks for governors to be central actors in the legislative arena. The results support the hypothesis that governors influence the behaviour of legislators from their provinces and parties in the national congress.     

Rural economies and leadership change in Central Asia

ABSTRACT

This article applies a political economy approach to questions of presidential succession in Central Asia. Using the cases of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan, it examines how institutions governing rural economies generate, channel and distribute rents within these authoritarian regimes. In some, these institutions concentrate rents under long-standing rulers; in others they diffuse rents away from rulers. The article then specifies obstacles to leadership change that arise from these rural economies, and the crises those obstacles may pose for authoritarian regimes in the region.     

The electoral logic of governor rotations in Ukraine: rulers’ authority,party strength,and regional polarization

How and under what conditions do authoritarian rulers use the state apparatus to help ensure victory? To answer this question, this paper examines electoral mobilization as a rationale for the appointment of governors in hybrid regimes. Given their absolute authority to use administrative resources, autocratic rulers prefer governors who can perform well in mobilizing the electorate in their favor. However, several circumstances make this strategy suboptimal or impossible. To provide empirical evidence supporting this argument, this study conducts a survival analysis using an original dataset of gubernatorial appointments and dismissals in Ukraine from 1996 to 2017. The results confirm that electoral performance was the primary driver of governor appointments during the presidency of Leonid Kuchma. In addition, it is demonstrated that various institutional conditions, such as party strength, the weak authority of the ruler within the central government, and regional polarization resulted in the adoption of different appointment strategies by subsequent presidents.     

Hidden in plain sight: political opposition and hegemonic authoritarianism in Azerbaijan

This paper examines the consolidation and maintenance of hegemonic authoritarianism in post-Soviet Azerbaijan. Hegemonic regimes are characterized by their nearly total lack of political competition. Despite the presence of opposition parties and regular elections, the incumbent in these cases is reelected with 70% or more of the vote. What does it take to sustain overwhelming margins of victory in regular elections in the face of institutionalized opposition? Previous studies have suggested that either violent repression or institutionalized co-optation of opposition groups is central to securing long-term hegemonic regime stability. These mechanisms explain how rulers forestall potential opposition. Upon coming to power in 1993, however, Heydar Aliyev – like many post-Soviet leaders – inherited a genuine, existing opposition in the Popular Front movement. I suggest that in the presence of an intractable opposition, Azerbaijan's rulers have taken a different approach with regard to regime maintenance. Drawing on over 50 original interviews conducted during 6 months of field research, I identify the mechanisms by which the government has “hidden the opposition in plain sight” by making it effectively difficult for existing opposition groups to function as credible political parties. Since the mid-1990s, the Aliyev regime has used informal measures to prevent these groups from aggregating and articulating the diverse interests present in society from visibly competing in elections and from serving effectively in government to craft and implement policy. These practices have rendered the opposition technically legal, but completely ineffective. Besides weakening the opposition, these measures produce a series of mutually reinforcing effects – including noncompetitive elections by default and a politically disengaged society – that sustain long-term regime stability. The paper concludes by examining this argument in comparative perspective. Hegemonic regimes have proliferated in the post-Soviet region, and I suggest that this strategy is an important factor in sustaining many of these regimes.     

The Impact of External Factors on Regime Transition: Lessons from the Russian Regions

While many studies have examined the external dimensions of democratization, the role of external anti-democratic factors remains unaddressed. Using an original dataset to analyze the presence and impact of external anti-democratic factors, this article aims to untangle the international dimensions of regime transition by singling out foreign trade. International post-Soviet trade links' impact on subnational political regimes in Russia is analyzed. Trade links between post-Soviet states and their regions are longstanding, dating back to the Soviet or even the tsarist period. The authors hypothesize that this variable was an important factor in regime transition in Russia's regions. The findings have wider implications for area studies and theoretical studies of democratization and regime transition.     

El camino hacia el poder Analizando la carrera política de los gobernadores argentinos (1983–2011)

The specific traits of Argentina's federal system are crucial to understand the institutional reality of this country and how politics work. Under this logic we find a component of great relevance: governors. As regards the analysis of political careers, most researches have focused on legislative functions, be it at a national or subnational level. Governors have been mostly studied as determinant factors of legislator's career development. However, there is not much research on the political career of provincial executive authorities. This work deepens the research on governors and their political career, with the purpose of understanding their origins and development. It is based on the study of elected governors between 1983 and 2011 in the 23 Argentinian provinces and the capital city (Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires). The conclusions drawn from the present study intend to deliver a first approach to the analysis of Argentinian governors’ political careers since the return to democracy in 1983, and establish a basis for future compared studies between federal countries in the region, as Brazil and Mexico.     

Subnational competitive authoritarianism and power-sharing in Bosnia and Herzegovina

ABSTRACT

Incremental democratic decline is evident in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), but measures of democracy conceal an uneven subnational distribution of autocratization. So far there has been limited research on the drivers and constraints to subnational autocratization. This paper aims to contribute to the literature on power-sharing by exploring instances of illiberal politics enacted by parties in government at the subnational level in BiH. Evidence is gathered through semi-structured interviews and analysis of three specific cases of illiberal politics. We find that the political contest in BiH is purposefully contained within ethnic and subnational boundaries and constrained through several layers of institutionalized multilevel and ethnic checks and balances. The main drivers of subnational autocratization are opportunities that arise from the institutional framework established during early democratization and postwar structures that blend executive dominance with economic power and informal party networks, and occasionally from an individual actor’s perceptions of threat. Democratization in BiH will need to address subnational politics and deep-rooted power structures if it is to be successful.     

Celebrating Continuity: The Role of State Holidays in Syria (1918–2010)

National holidays are one of the major instruments of regimes and rulers aiming to legitimise their hegemony and maintain the social and political order. This article deals with the way in which successive Syrian regimes have celebrated the national—secular and religious—holidays. It compares the various Syrian regimes: the monarchy (1918–1920); the mandate period (1920–1946); and the republic period (1946–present).Although the latter period will be treated as a whole, the analysis differentiates between five periods: post-independence (1946–1958); the United Arab Republic (UAR; 1958–1961); the secessionist regime (1961–1963); and the Ba‘th regime (1963–present), with Bashar replacing his father in June 2000. The main thesis of this article is that Syrian regimes prefer continuity over change in the realm of state holidays. Thus, in contrast to Iraq, where each new regime has attempted to delegitimise its predecessor by abolishing the national calendar and inventing a new one, Syrian regimes have added new holidays to the calendar without erasing the old ones. In this way, Syria's calendar resembles an edifice occasionally renovated according to the regime's needs, but never demolished. This policy emanated from a desire to demonstrate continuity even in times of change and upheaval, while at the same time consolidating the local national identity, which has often competed with other supra-identities, such as pan-Arabism and Islam.     

Coming to terms with the communist past: East Germany in comparative perspective

As so often after the collapse of authoritarian regimes, the post‐communist societies of eastern Europe confront the problem of dealing with alleged regime‐sponsored criminality by their predecessor rulers. This article examines the various approaches taken toward this problem in Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and (east) Germany, with special emphasis on the anomalies presented by the latter case. It is argued that the different approaches taken in these countries can be explained by a combination of two main factors: the ‘weight of the past’ (the level of development of civil society before 1989) and the ‘politics of the present’.     

Analytic authoritarianism and Nigeria

Despite two decades of democratisation and some recent liberalisation in North Africa, dictatorships linger around the world. New research on comparative authoritarianism questions personal rule and studies a range of dependent variables, such as why dictators sometimes provide public goods. This ‘analytic authoritarian’ literature emphasises collective governance and explores the institutional basis of policy control. Nigeria's military regimes between 1966 and 1998 provide examples of how military factions and subnational actors can impose transaction costs on authoritarian policy processes. These alternative centres of policy control limited the ability of dictators to unilaterally advance their policy preferences on questions relating to federalism and transition plans. The article concludes by linking this analysis to Nigeria's lingering legacies of authoritarianism and the institutional basis of its 1999 transition.     

Multi-level Implementation of International Law: The Role of Vertical Epistemic Communities

Subnational entities in federal states typically retain a degree of sovereignty and enjoy leeway in implementation, raising questions such as whether—and how—international law is actually implemented at the subnational level. This article sheds light on these questions, using two contrasted case studies in Switzerland: The Istanbul Convention on domestic violence and the European Union (EU) Directive 2016/680 on data protection. Based on a document analysis of the law-making process and 44 semi-structured interviews with national and subnational political actors, we observe how international obligations are legally implemented, that is, transposed into legislation at the subnational level. Our results show that: (1) Subnational civil servants play a decisive role, while members of parliament are marginal. (2) Civil servants may constitute Vertical Epistemic Communities (VECs), which are able to “technicize” the issue to ensure swift implementation through administrative venues. (3) VECs are particularly influential as they use intercantonal conferences as institutional platforms to shape implementation processes. Otherwise, implementation becomes politicized, and its success strongly depends on subnational politics.     

Dialectics of industrialization in Indonesia

This essay investigates how the degeneration of state socialist regimes and the transition to market-Leninist political economies in China and Vietnam have shaped institutional arrangements governing welfare and its stratification effects. Engaging recent theoretical literature one welfare regimes, the article explores how the evolution of specific combinations of political and economic institutions in China and Vietnam has affected the production and reproduction of welfare and stratification. The common assumption that welfare regimes reflect the structured interests of dominant political and economic actors and thus serve to reproduce that regime is found to invite an excessively static perspective. Instead this essay argues that welfare regimes and stratification in contemporary China and Vietnam require an appreciation of their properties under state-socialism and how specific paths of extrication affected their degeneration and subsequent development under a new form of political economy. The essay also probes the significance of observed differences in China and Vietnam’s political structure in light of suggestions that Vietnam’s more pluralistic political system has made its welfare regime more redistributive than China’s. An alternative perspective suggests China’s wealth obviates the significance of such differences.     

Adapting to Lisbon: Reforming the Role of German Landesparlamente in EU Affairs

In Europeanisation studies subnational parliaments are so far treated as a quantité négligeable – despite the fact that their key functions are strongly affected by European integration and they are perceived as losers of European integration. Given the provisions of the Lisbon Treaty, which acknowledges a role for subnational parliaments on subsidiarity issues, and given the concept of parliamentary ‘responsibility for integration’ introduced by the German Bundesverfassungsgericht, this represents a substantial gap. These recent changes in the institutional environment have led to a wave of reforms in the German Landesparlamente concerning their EU-related functions. The key strategy is strengthening the control function vis-à-vis the Länder governments. The high degree of convergence in terms of control strategies and instruments is explained by the fact that these reforms follow by and large the path adopted in the aftermath of the Maastricht Treaty, but with some interesting modifications.     

Education Funding in a Recentralizing Democracy: A Cautionary Tale of Four Brazilian Cities

The administration of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso enacted measures to constrain subnational politicians in a newly democratized and highly decentralized federal system. Lacking sufficient accountability at the subnational level, the central government attempted to increase its control of educational funding and minimize local discretion over educational spending. These reforms constrained the distribution of intergovernmental transfers, but entrusted the disbursement of educational spending to local oversight. This article argues that while the constraints protected the federal treasury from predatory practices, the local oversight did not protect educational spending from mayoral discretion. This argument is based on an analysis of initial reform implementation in four municipal school systems. The mayors responded to the federal initiatives in a variety of ways, but these were based on the requirements of their own political survival. The four cases thereby become studies in how one effort to recentralize democracy is working in Brazil.     

Three dilemmas of hybrid regime governance: Russia from Putin to Putin

This article investigates how hybrid regimes supply governance by examining a series of dilemmas (involving elections, the mass media, and state institutions) that their rulers face. The authors demonstrate how regime responses to these dilemmas – typically efforts to maintain control while avoiding outright repression and societal backlash – have negative outcomes, including a weakening of formal institutions, proliferation of “substitutions” (e.g., substitutes for institutions), and increasing centralization and personalization of control. Efforts by Russian leaders to disengage society from the sphere of decision-making entail a significant risk of systemic breakdown in unexpected ways. More specifically, given significantly weakened institutions for interest representation and negotiated compromise, policy-making in the Russian system often amounts to the leadership's best guess (ad hoc manual policy adjustments) as to precisely what society will accept and what it will not, with a significant possibility of miscalculation. Three case studies of the policy-making process are presented: the 2005 cash-for-benefits reform, plans for the development of the Khimki Forest, and changes leading up to and following major public protests in 2011–2012.     

The Explosive Combination of Inefficient Local Bureaucracies and Mining Production: Evidence from Localized Societal Protests in Peru

Although numerous scholars have analyzed the effects of natural resource extraction at the national level, few have explored it systematically at the local level. Focusing on Peru, where both mining production and local social protests have greatly increased in recent years and where a new tax has required mining companies to transfer revenue to subnational governments, this study explores the resource curse at the local level. In particular, why do protests arise mostly in the areas of natural resource extraction? Employing subnational data for Peru for the period 2004–9 and LAPOP survey data from 2010, the research confirms previous findings that social conflict is provoked by both the negative externalities of mining and the revenues from the new tax. The article further demonstrates that local bureaucratic capacity is a significant independent variable. Greater subnational bureaucratic capacity can ameliorate the pernicious societal effects of a local resource curse.     

Committed to Coordination? Intergovernmental Councils as a Federal Safeguard

In this research note, I suggest that the design of intergovernmental councils (IGC) accounts for the extent to which they are able to prevent the federal government from encroaching on subnational jurisdictions. IGC operate in areas of interdependence where the federal government faces incentives to restore to hierarchical coordination. The effect of the intergovernmental safeguard is measured by the absence or presence of federal encroachment. Two concepts are useful to explain it: the extent to which governments are committed to coordination and the dominance of the federal government of vertical IGC. I argue that different combinations of the two variables help to understand the safeguarding effect of intergovernmental councils. In particular, I contend that in any configuration in which federal dominance is present the federal government can encroach on subnational jurisdictions. The research note shows how the concept of federal safeguards can be applied empirically.     

AFRICAN WEAK STATES AND COMMERCIAL ALLIANCES

Conventional analyses of Africa's ‘failed states’conclude that patronage networks fragment as state resourcesdecline. As payoffs from rulers decline, once-loyal strongmenbecome warlords, attacking centralized authority. This articleexamines how rulers of weak states actually manage increasinglythreatening patronage networks. The cases of Angola and SierraLeone show how rulers use more reliable foreign mining firmsand foreign private (mercenary) armies to marginalize threateningstrongmen. At home, militarising commerce denies its benefitsto enterprising strongmen. Rulers then receive creditor financialsupport for their offensives against elements of their old patronagenetwork and insurgencies, seeming to battle corruption and inefficiency.Rulers discover that they can use foreign firms to collect revenue,defend territory and conduct diplomacy with other states andmultilateral agencies more reliably then domestic bureaucratsor strongmen whose political authority may threaten their own.This new political alliance increases the economic viabilityof some weak states. Paradoxically, the destruction of conventionalstate institutions eases the hard pressed ruler's efforts torecruit aid from global society and manage the demands of competitionin global markets.     

Decentralization's Nondemocratic Roots: Authoritarianism and Subnational Reform in Latin America

This study challenges the common view of authoritarianism as an unambiguously centralizing experience by investigating the subnational reforms that military governments actually introduced in Latin America. It argues that the decision by military authorities to dismiss democratically elected mayors and governors opened a critical juncture for the subsequent development of subnational institutions. Once they centralized political authority, the generals could contemplate changes that expanded the institutional, administrative, and governing capacity of subnational governments. This article shows how cross-national variation in the content and consistency of the generals' economic goals led to quite distinct subnational changes; in each case, these reforms profoundly shaped the democracies that reemerged in the 1980s and 1990s.