Behind the Book: Illiberal Practices

The contributors to this volume look at six very large federal democracies which between them encompass half the total world population of those living under nationally “democratic” systems of government. These are also six democratic federations with notably varied political responsiveness to citizen demands. They include older democracies such as the United States and India, as well as countries that democratized at the end of the Cold War, such as Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and Russia. The cases show that territorial unevenness is not exclusive to new democracies and the inclusion of countries that have been democratic for a longer period of time allows us to analyze how they overcame or failed to overcome territorial variability.

Russia is included as a limit case. Indeed, much of the current literature avoids the designation of Russia as a democracy. But the best argument for its inclusion refers to the decade between 1994 and 

2004, from the plebiscite that ratified the current constitution to the suppression of the direct election of governors. The inclusion of the United States is also bound to elicit queries. There is still a longstanding debate about US “exceptionalism” that obstructs any straightforward comparison with other countries, but this was a crucial feature of our comparative project in not just empirical but also analytical or theoretical terms. The US case really matters because of the deeply entrenched nature of its racially exclusionary politics (“Jim Crow” across the Deep South) and the profound impact of this regional set of anti-democratic practices on the overall national system. This volume draws attention to the great momentum behind long run historical traditions of locally illiberal structures and practices- and the US provides the most striking confirmation of this pattern.  

But this book is not confined to the past. It also develops a framework of possible pathways toward through which illiberal structures and practices at the subnational level may be challenged and modified.

Jacqueline Behrend is a professor of political science at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín and a tenured researcher at the Argentine National Council for Scientific and Technical Research.Laurence Whitehead is a senior research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford University. He is the author of Democratization: Theory and Experience. Their latest book, Illiberal Practices: Territorial Variance within Large Federal Democracies is available now.