How social movements facilitate bottom-up subnational authoritarian enclave democratization

For decades, we have mainly theorized and measured democracy on the national level. This has led us to oversee, however, that democracy may not be spread out evenly across the territory of a nation. This critique of democracy theory led to the ‘subnational turn’ in comparative democratization studies. By focusing on the subnational level, scholars found that subnational authoritarian enclaves frequently persist within countries that are considered to be democratic. Scholars identified several pathways through which such enclaves can democratize. In this manuscript I argue that there is a bottom-up gap in subnational democratization literature, as all existing pathways depend on the actions of elites. I question if and how social movements can facilitate subnational democratization. I answer this puzzle by doing two in-depth case studies, and by comparing their results. The first case study is located in Isabela, the Philippines and the second in Oaxaca, Mexico. I systematically gathered new data in extensive academic fieldwork in both cases. I conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews and did archival research. I engage in theory-building causal process-tracing and sequencing. I found that in Isabela, social movement actors engaged in what I call the ‘attrition’ mechanism. This mechanism forms an incremental pathway to subnational democratization that I call the ‘evolutionary pathway’. The results from the Oaxaca case show that social movement actors were a contextualizing antecedent cause for party-led subnational democratization. This sequence forms a quick and sudden pathway to subnational democratization that I call the ‘revolutionary pathway’.
submitted by Trix van Mierlo
Kumulative Dissertation aus drei Artikeln
Dissertation Universiy of Innsbruck 2022