In this book project, I ask: Does winning additional subnational executive office enable the opposition to better keep the national executive from undermining democracy? Since the days of Montesquieu and de Tocqueville, a largely untested proposition has been that unaligned incumbents at subnational levels reduce opportunities for the national executive to undermine democracy. Descriptively, over 89% of democracies after 1990 allocate executive authority in both national and subnational elections. In my theoretical framework, opposition parties leverage subnational incumbency, and the state access and political visibility it provides, to (a) become more electorally competitive in national elections, (b) incentivize office-seeking MPs to exert more legislative constraints, and (c) ultimately reduce opportunities for elected leaders to aggrandize. A regression-discontinuity design with almost the complete universe of races for highest subnational executive office in democratic Latin America and the Caribbean (1990-2021) demonstrates that such office significantly enhances local opposition competitiveness in subsequent national lower-house elections. At the country-level, I collected novel data on subnational election outcomes in 84 out of 106 politically-decentralized democracies (1990-2021). Fixed-effects panel analyses highlight that higher levels of subnational opposition control have immediate positive effects on horizontal checks on the national executive and reduces the extent to which it violates the constitution. Strikingly, these effects of subnational opposition incumbency exist even in unitary and unicameral democracies. This research provides evidence that subnational control under democracy affects how much and through which strategies oppositions constrain the national executive.
My dissertation on this topic can be found on ProQuest and eScholarship (link).
Julian Michel 