Multilevel Regime Decoupling: The Territorial Dimension of Autocratization and Contemporary Regime Change

Abstract

Regimes do not change consistently across territorial levels. There has been progress in understanding national democratic erosions and subnational regimes, but barring a few exceptions, these research strands have not engaged in a thorough dialogue. To bridge this gap, I contend that when democracy advances in one territorial level, but erodes in another, we observe multilevel regime decoupling (MRD). Using global data from the Varieties of Democracy project, I examine the 1990–2022 period, showing that the proportion of decoupled cases increased from 20% in the 1990s, to 43% in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Preliminary regression analyses and a descriptive exploration of Italy, South Africa, India, and the United States indicate the non-deterministic influence of structural factors and the potentially pivotal role of courts in facilitating decoupled change. Considering these findings, renewed data collection efforts and an actor-centred approach are needed to strengthen our understanding of the varieties of (de)coupled regime change that have become common over the last decade. Given that regimes across territorial levels increasingly move in separate directions, future assessments of autocratization and democratic change need to embed territorial considerations in their analysis to remain informative about citizens’ real-world experiences on the ground.

Javier Pérez Sandoval

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow

My research focuses on subnational regime heterogeneity across Latin America.