Subnational Comparison Research Articles

Comparing Health and Health Care from a Subnational Perspective: Saskatchewan and Nebraska

Both critics and apologists of the health-care system in the United States regularly invoke comparisons with Canadian health care. National comparisons are instructive but can lack the precision of subnational comparisons. In recent decades, the field of comparative politics has recognized the advantages of subnational comparisons. The Great Plains subnational entities of Saskatchewan and Nebraska share commonalities regarding cultural, historical, and ecological conditions, and thus a comparison of the health-care system components and health outcomes yields intriguing results. In terms of health-care components, there is some substantial variation (e.g., differing financing mechanisms), along with some similarities (e.g., provider shortages). Health outcomes show similarities between Saskatchewan and Nebraska (e.g., leading causes of death) and some differences (e.g., suicide rate). Overall, the results show that Saskatchewan and Nebraska face comparable challenges in improving the health of their populations. Further, this analysis shows that subnational comparison is a useful approach for creating learning opportunities to address policy problems and solutions.

The Quality of Legal Systems and Property Rights by State: A Ranking and Their Implications for Economic Freedom

This paper constructs a new measure of the quality of the legal system and property rights by U.S. state, combining five pieces of data to develop a novel measure of institutional quality. It integrates this measure to the Economic Freedom of North America index to give a more complete subnational comparison of United States institutions. The quality of the legal system and property rights are measured to be strongest in the upper Midwest and northern New England, and weakest in the South and Hawaii. The integration of this data into Economic Freedom of North America has considerable implications for our understanding of economic freedom at the regional level.

Controlling bureaucracies in weak institutional contexts: The politics of police autonomy

AbstractThis article argues that political competition determines how and when elected politicians can reduce police autonomy. While bureaucratic autonomy is generally lauded in developed democracies, it can result in serious malfeasance in contexts of institutional weakness. Political incumbents may reduce police autonomy through different means and for various purposes. While some politicians seek to professionalize police forces and align them with the rule of law, others aspire to politicize police to appropriate its rents from corruption. This article shows that lack of rotation in office (low political turnover) increases politicians' control of police, while under low turnover, fragmentation in cabinets and the legislature influences whether politicians seek to professionalize or politicize the force. The article illustrates this theory with a subnational comparison of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and Santa Fe (Argentina), relying on 80 interviews with police and politicians.

State Regulation of Organized Crime: Politicians, Police, and Drug Trafficking in Argentina

ABSTRACTIn many developing countries with weak formal institutions, the protection of state actors is essential for organized criminal activities and illicit markets to emerge and thrive. This article examines the relationship between the state’s regulation of drug trafficking and its associated violence in highly fragmented markets. It argues that political competition influences coordination among the police, generating different types of regulatory regimes. Police with greater coordination implement protection rackets that curb violence; uncoordinated police carry out particularistic negotiations with drug traffickers that exacerbate criminal violence. This argument is illustrated with a subnational comparison of two Argentine provinces that experienced a similar drug market expansion with different patterns of violence. These cases show how corrupt states can obtain relative order in highly fragmented drug markets, and illustrate police influence in shaping the evolution of drug dealing in metropolitan areas.

From Within to Between Nations: Subnational Comparison across Borders

Long a staple in the toolkit of American politics, comparison among subnational territorial units has gained increasing currency in comparative politics. A growing portion of subnational research, especially in the monographic literature, employs comparisons of subnational territorial units within different countries. This approach to comparison, which I term transnational comparison, has the potential to build on and extend the advantages of subnational comparison. Despite the numerous added challenges it poses, transnational comparison offers a variety of ways to incorporate and leverage variations between countries as well as within them. Drawing on exemplary studies from the literature on subnational regimes and beyond, I outline a typology of successful transnational comparative strategies. The choice among these strategies depends on their distinctive properties, on the substantive questions asked, and on the stage of a research program. All have contributed to advancing the study of politics beyond nation-centered comparison.

Political Resources and Divergent Court Empowerment in China: A Subnational Comparison

The cities of Guiyang and Kunming are known among legal scholars, practitioners, and policy makers for hosting two of China’s earliest specialized environmental tribunals, following serious water contamination in the two cities. However, the judicialization of environmental protection appears to be relatively nominal in Kunming and substantial in Guiyang. Why? We contend that, at a critical juncture, different political resources available to local leaders—including their past networks and experiences—led them to implement different strategies to deal with these crises. Under similar conditions, different political resources thus led to divergent outcomes of judicial empowerment. We use process tracing to describe the causal sequence in the adoption and application of policies of judicialization. Whether courts are empowered to operate proactively or conservatively is the result of the strategies of local actors in response to the policy agenda set forth by political leaders and constrained by political leaders’ available political resources. This study contributes to existing theories of court empowerment in authoritarian regimes that have largely relied on national-level or socioeconomic factors. Through a controlled subnational comparison in China, this article provides an alternative theory of divergent practices of court empowerment.

Política, policía y violencia: La regulación del Narcotráfico en el Cono Sur

Despite being a transnational organized crime, drug trafficking has a local impact in terms of security and violence, which is typically managed by non-national state actors. This paper proposes that, given their juridical and material constraints, subnational state agencies, primarily police forces, regulate drug trafficking through a combination of toleration, repression and rent extraction. I also argue that greater coordination within law enforcement agencies at the subnational level leads to lower drug-related violence at the retail dealing level. I illustrate this argument with a subnational comparison of four cases in Argentina and Brazil during the last two decades.

Corporate Social Responsibility, Institutional Environments, and Tax Avoidance: Evidence from a Subnational Comparison in China

We examine the association between mandatory corporate social responsibility (CSR) disclosure and economic contribution (tax payments) in China, where we expect this association to be affected by a region's institutional attributes. Exploiting a dataset that shows cross-regional variations in institutions, we find that in regions with lower institutional quality, firms claiming to be socially responsible actually avoid taxes, whereas CSR disclosure in other regions is more aligned with the social responsibility aspect of tax compliance. Our study contributes to the literature by demonstrating that in the absence of proper institutions, CSR disclosure is likely to remain a form of window dressing.

Corrigendum

Helbling, M., & Traunmüller, R. (2016). How state support of religion shapes attitudes toward Muslim immigrants: New evidence from a sub-national comparison. Comparative Political Studies, 49, 391-424. (Original DOI: 10.1177/0010414015612388 )

How State Support of Religion Shapes Attitudes Toward Muslim Immigrants. New Evidence from a Subnational Comparison

Why do so many citizens in European democracies fear Muslim immigration, dislike Muslims’ religious practices and oppose their religious rights? Looking at political contexts, this paper offers a new explanation and argues that governments play a considerable role in shaping citizens’ attitudes toward the Muslim minority through the way they regulate religion. European democracies are far from secular and matters of religious regulation cannot be reduced to abstract values or constitutional clauses. Under conditions of high state support of religion, accommodating new religious minorities not only involves the changing of existing rules but giving up on longstanding traditions, the loss of privileges, and everyday habits. As a result, citizens see religious newcomers as a threat to their way of life and react with animosity to their practices and demands. We support our argument by combining newly designed survey items on attitudes towards Muslims, the headscarf and the minaret with original data on religious regulation in a subnational comparison of 26 political contexts in Switzerland – a case whose accommodation of religious differences was praised by the classics of comparative politics but has now become a striking example for the new political conflict over Muslim immigration. Our findings contradict the extant literature and have important implications for the democratic challenges in Europe, the quality of modern immigration societies, and the role of religion in democracy more generally.

How State Support of Religion Shapes Attitudes Toward Muslims

Given the salience of political conflicts over Muslim immigration in many Western countries, it is surprising how little we know about the reasons why Muslims are resented and their religious practices opposed. This paper takes a look at political factors and argues that governments shape citizens’ attitudes toward the Muslim minority through the way they regulate religion. Under conditions of high state support of religion, accommodating religious minorities not only involves the changing of existing rules but giving up on long-standing traditions, the loss of privileges, and everyday habits. As a result, citizens will see religious newcomers as a threat to their way of life and react with animosity to their practices and demands. We support our argument, which differs from existing ones in the literature, by combining newly designed survey items with original data on religious regulation in a subnational comparison of the Swiss case. Results and robustness checks show that citizens living in political contexts with higher levels of state support of religion are more likely to think that there are too many Muslims in the country and that the building of minarets should be banned. Results for attitudes on Muslim women’s right to wear headscarves in public point in a similar direction. The paper contributes to the recent growth in scholarly interest in public attitudes toward immigrants in general and Muslim immigrants in particular.

Global Processes and Local Consequences of Decentralization: A Sub-national Comparison in Mexico

Topal A. Global processes and local consequences of decentralization: a sub-national comparison in Mexico, Regional Studies. This paper argues that through decentralization policies, the imperatives of neoliberal rules of competition have been diffused into the local level, generating different development patterns depending upon characteristics of the local economy and its insertion into global processes. Therefore, implications of decentralization policies can be analysed by focusing on prevailing local economic activity and a particular pattern of class forces that arise from it. The paper attempts to make the case that how each local economy integrates into global economic processes, and which economic and social groups are empowered and/or disempowered in that integration, shape the pattern of local development.

Explaining Anti-Chinese Riots in Late 20th Century Indonesia

Summary In this essay we ask why anti-Chinese riots took place in some Indonesian cities but not in others during the upheaval of May 1998. Employing process-tracing within a sub-national comparison of four cities, we argue that anti-Chinese riots in May 1998 were a frame-shifting strategy employed by security forces to distract public attention from their failure to control anti-government student demonstrations. Anti-Chinese rioting took place only where the local government and the security forces failed to limit the repertoires and spatial reach of protests used by prior student demonstrators.

‘We Have Always Lived Here’: Indigenous Movements, Citizenship and Poverty in Argentina

This article explores the nexus between indigenous mobilisation, citizenship, and poverty in Argentina. A subnational comparison of land struggles among the Diaguita Calchaquí in Tucumán and the Mbya Guaraní in Misiones shows that changing global and national opportunity structures, most prominently a new multicultural citizenship regime, set the stage for indigenous mobilisation. In turn, local transformations of capitalist development motivate indigenous mobilising efforts, whereas leadership patterns and state–movement relations shape the capacity to mobilise. Diaguita and Mbya mobilisation reveals that indigenous movements play a central role in the activation of formal citizenship rights and the contestation of dominant notions of poverty. At the same time, the current design of multicultural citizenship and the adverse socioeconomic incorporation of indigenous communities also counteract indigenous mobilising efforts in Argentina.

Why Some Cities Provide More Public Goods than Others: A Subnational Comparison of the Provision of Public Goods in German Cities in 1912

What determines a government’s level of public goods provision? Most scholarship tends to focus on the “demand side” of public goods provision, highlighting how varying patterns of social preferences shape the provision of public goods. In an analysis of municipal hospitals and infant health clinics in Germany’s 84 largest cities in 1912, this article uses an original dataset to test a variety of hypotheses to introduce an alternative logic centered around the institutional capability of local governments. The findings suggest a supply-side theory of public goods provision in which the fiscal resources of cities and the professionalism of local government officials are important determinants of the level of public goods. The implications of these findings are two-fold: first, in federal political systems, highly capable local governments—with resources, expertise and professionalism—might represent a “decentralized” or “bottom-up” path for achieving higher overall levels of state infrastructural power in a political system. Second, public health threats might serve as a crucial trigger for the development of local capacity and hence state infrastructural power more broadly.

The Construction of the Rule of Law in Argentina: A Tale of Two Provinces

El pueblo unidojamds serd vencido.' In October 1998, for the first time in over a decade, these words reverberated in the main square of San Luis, Argentina. A diverse group gathered to demand reform from Governor Adolfo Rodriguez Saa, who had accumulated absolute control of provincial politics during his fifteen consecutive years in office. Lawyers and former judges carried a coffin symbolizing the death of justice in the province of San Luis. As part of the governor's assault against judicial autonomy, he had purged and packed the courts, lowered judges' salaries, and prohibited suits against the state, all violations of the San Luis and Argentine constitutions. Surprisingly, right next door to San Luis in the province of Mendoza, judicial autonomy has increased since Argentina's 1983 transition to democracy. Mendoza's governors have complied with the constitutional system of checks and balances. In contrast to Rodriguez Sad, Mendoza's governors have respected judges' salary protection and life tenure and have submitted to the many rulings that challenge executive interests. Why are there very different levels of judicial autonomy in these two provinces? How was San Luis's governor able to eliminate the efficacy of all potential checks on his power? How do events in these Argentine provinces relate to the rule of law in other countries? Scholars of democratization have argued that many new democracies are delegative and illiberal and risk breaking down. They are incomplete or defective. Elections and other democratic mechanisms are only partially embedded or not embedded at all in the rule of law.2 While almost all studies recognize the importance of the rule of law, virtually none discusses how it emerges. Subnational comparison can address this gap. Under the rule of law, powerful state and private actors are bound by formal legal rules. In theory, the rule of law and democracy go together. In practice, however, many new democracies have yet to construct a rule of law. The pattern of democratization in most third wave nations has been very different than in the mature democracies of North America and western Europe, where the rule of law preceded or developed in tandem with democracy. In many emerging democracies the sequence has been reversed. Countries such as Argentina, Russia, and Brazil instituted open

Introduction: Regimes and Democracy in Latin America

T he dramatic alternation of democratic and authoritarian regimes in Latin America has provided both the empirical base and the normative motivation for research that is conceptually innovative, methodologically self-conscious, and richly grounded in the analysis of cases. ~ This tradition of research has generated an impressive range of substantive findings about some of the most important questions of politics. Moreover, it has been associated with significant methodological innovations--helping contribute to new perspectives on small-N comparative analysis, and to the refinement and enrichment of concepts in comparative research. For these reasons, the study of national political regimes in Latin America has been a prominent locus of influential work in comparative politics and comparative social science over nearly four decades. This special issue of Studies in Comparative International Development presents a new set of articles that further advances this tradition of research. The three central concerns are: (1) the ongoing effort to open new agendas and identify new research questions; (2) methodological issues, specifically the measurement of key concepts and the systematic use of subnational comparison; and (3) the empirical assessment of causal claims about regime change, in the present case building on an approach that frames these claims within a long time horizon. Guillermo O'Donnell 's article extends his earlier efforts to formulate concepts appropriate for the analysis of democracy in Latin America since the 1980s. The point of departure is O'Donnell 's observation that existing democratic theory does not provide an adequate framework for studying these democracies. He points out tha t -notwi ths tanding the recent emphasis on procedural minimum definitions--efforts to conceptualize democracy that draw upon Joseph Schumpeter inherently cannot limit themselves to institutional

Resemblance and Relief: National Clustering and Social Assistance Provision—A Subnational Comparison

Social assistance--cash and in-kind benefits provided to those deemed to be without the means for an adequate level of subsistence--has been a point of constant comparison between the United States and Canada. These comparisons have generally tended to point to Canada's generosity in contrast to the meager levels of assistance provided in the United States.(1) Not only is Canada's social safety net widely accepted as more generous than that found in the U.S., but Canadians are also generally thought to be more favorable toward social welfare per se than Americans.(2) Without debating the accuracy of such generalizations qua generalizations, they overlook important variations both among states and among provinces. In doing so, they also overstate the differences between the American states as a group and the Canadian provinces as a group. Broadly stated, Canadian provinces are far stronger political actors than are the American states. However, both states and provinces exercise important responsibilities in the provision of social assistance. In policy areas where states and provinces are significant actors, it is logically necessary, prior to making generalizations about national differences, to examine whether there is in fact some significant level of national clustering--whether policies in the various states tend to look more like policy in other states than in the Canadian provinces and vice versa. In the absence of strong consistent national clustering among subnational jurisdictions, differences in public policies across provinces and states cannot be meaningfully explained by reference to national or system-level characteristics.(3) An examination of social assistance provision in the states and provinces reveals that rather than one country being consistently more generous than the other, an alternative characterization emphasizes the continuing lack of strong national clustering. This paper, therefore, illustrates the need for considerable caution in overemphasizing national-level differences between social assistance provision in the two countries. Central Government Programs for Social Assistance Provision of social assistance by states and provinces has taken place within each country's respective federal framework and the differences in these frameworks have been significant. However, distinctive federal arrangements do not constitute presumptive evidence of national clustering among states and provinces in terms of how social assistance is actually provided. Under both federal systems, states and provinces continue to retain considerable latitude to provide assistance in the manner they see fit. This flexibility contributes to making careful consideration of national clustering among states and provinces necessary. In both the United States and Canada, jurisdiction over the provision of last resort aid to the needy is granted to the states and provinces. Provinces have jurisdiction over social assistance by virtue of the constitutional provision granting them exclusive jurisdiction over hospitals, asylums, charities and eleemosynary institutions [S.97, 7] which was buttressed by powers over `all matters of a merely local or private nature' (S.92, 16).(4) In the U.S., social assistance falls under the range of activities not expressly assigned to the federal government by the constitution and thus remains the prerogative of the states. Despite these similarities, there are significant differences between the jurisdictional frameworks in the two countries as they have evolved. While the federal governments in both countries have asserted their constitutional capacity to provide income-tested benefits directly to individuals by virtue of the federal spending power, the two countries differ regarding means-tested (income and asset-tested) benefits. Direct federal provision of means-tested benefits existing in the U.S. (for example, Supplemental Security Income for the aged, blind, and disabled) would not be constitutionally legal in Canada. …

A Subnational Perspective for Comparative Research: Education and development in Northeast Brazil and Northeast Thailand

Guided by the growing emphasis on the importance of economic regions rather than nations, we utilize the Northeast of Brazil and the Northeast of Thailand as case studies to consider the fruitfulness of a subnational approach to comparative research. A major goal of this inquiry is to provide an overview of the complex interactions between economic, educational, demographic and environmental factors embedded in critically important political and cultural contexts. Our thesis is that subnational comparisons between countries are often more meaningful than aggregate, cross-national ones. The intent of this inquiry, therefore, is not to equate Thailand and Brazil, but rather to highlight the importance of subnational comparisons. The overall economic and educational evidence we present reveals the Northeast regions of both Brazil and Thailand to be substantially disadvantaged. Without a subnational comparison, however, we propose that the overall economic performance of each country cannot accurately be determined. Gross generalizations and conclusions based on measures of central tendencies ignore important subnational differences and disparities in development within a country.