Subnational Undemocratic Regimes in the Americas: Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States in Comparative Perspective

As the editors note in their introduction to this special issue, one of the distinctive similarities between Latin America and the United States is the phenomenon of enclave rule.In both settings, "expanded political competition at the national level enabled peripheral elites to protect subnational fiefdoms" in ways that sometimes resulted in regime juxtaposition (intro essay).Enclave rule is not the modal pattern in either Latin America or the US, and yet federalism has provided shelter for important subnational deviations from democracy in both cases.Unlike in unitary systems, federations let constituent units design and enforce their own constitutions, electoral rules, and political institutions, which can be used to construct and reproduce political regimes that are juxtaposed with the national level.Recently, the prevalence of subnational undemocratic regimes (SURs) alongside democratic national regimes has emerged as a vibrant topic of study in both the comparative and American politics subfields, generating significant advances in our understanding of the origins, continuity, and breakdown of SURs in both the US and Latin America (Gervasoni 2010b(Gervasoni , 2018;;Gibson 2005Gibson , 2013;;Giraudy 2010Giraudy , 2013Giraudy , 2015;; Grumbach 2022a, b;Mickey 2015).However, apart from Gibson (2013), there have been no attempts to systematically study these processes across the Americas, which is problematic because -despite a similar object of study -concepts