Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Governing Countries: A Theory Of Subnational Regime Variation, Kelly Mcmann, John Gerring, Matthew Maguire, Michael Coppedge, Staffan Lindberg

Faculty Publications, School of Management

Studies of a small number of countries have revealed that both democratic and non-democratic subnational governments can exist within a single country. However, these works have neither demonstrated how common subnational regime variation is nor explained why some countries are more prone to it. This paper does both. Using Varieties of Democracy subnational data for countries of the world from 1900 to 2012, we show that subnational regime variation exists throughout all regions, in both unitary and federal states, and in both the present and past. The paper also demonstrates theoretically and empirically how social heterogeneity and factors undermining the …