| Popis: |
Autonomy inheres in concepts of federalism, and most comparative measures of federalism attempt to capture variation in this autonomy among countries. We propose a new concept and measure of federalism based on the formal rules governing the autonomy of constituent units to design local political institutions. Specifically, we analyze the openness of subnational party systems to new contenders. The key dimensions of openness we identify include rules governing party formation, the maintenance of a valid party registry and access to public funding. We compare three critical cases: Mexico, Brazil, and the United States. The first section of the paper introduces our conceptualization of institutional congruence and explains our measure of how open or closed local party systems are. In a second step, we introduce a new dataset, which allows us to identify empirically how open or closed state-level party systems are. We apply our measure to electoral codes from all 32 Mexican, 27 Brazilian and the 50 U.S. states. Our analysis shows that there is considerable intra- and inter-country variation with regard to the degree of party system openness. We build on the subnational data to examine congruence in rules across levels. While the rules governing party formation in Brazil are highly congruent (i.e., uniform), Mexico and the US grant constituent units considerable leeway with regard to the design of subnational institutions. The third section of the paper examines the implications of this variation for our understanding of party politics and comparative federalism. The rank order of subnational autonomy produced by our measure differs considerably from other commonly used indicators, such as subnational revenue or expenditure. Contrary to conventional perceptions of Brazil as a highly decentralized country, for instance, we find higher levels of institutional congruence in Brazil than in our other two cases. Our analysis therefore challenges commonly held notions about the degree of decentralization in these three federations. By conceptualizing and measuring state-to-state differences in party systems, we demonstrate the analytic costs of ignoring territorial variation in the rules governing party politics. In light of recent concerns about the emergence and consolidation of subnational authoritarian enclaves, our analysis offers a richer empirical account of the ‘federal pact’ than previous measurements. |
