LAUSR

This volume joins a burgeoning subnational turn in the study of comparative politics. This trend began in the 1990s with Guillermo O’Donnell’s work on the territorial unevenness of democracy amidst the third wave of democratization. While it soon broadened to examine many phenomena, it is to O’Donnell’s subject that Illiberal Practices so successfully returns. While much of the literature has been concerned with understanding durable subnational authoritarianism in federal democracies, this volume focuses on more subtle but still vitally important “illiberal structures and practices” (hereafter ISAP) at the provincial level. These cases “fall short of institutionalized subnational authoritarian regimes but nonetheless constitute an important challenge to democracy” (p. 5). Here, formal political institutions function, but coexist with informal institutions or are dominated by powerful political families, traditional elites, firm owners, and others. Violations of the rule of law, lessthan-independent local media, and corrupt or partisan policing can further frustrate citizens’ ability to secure responsive democratic governance. Coeditors Jacqueline Behrend and Laurence Whitehead bring together conceptual and theoretical discussions, with chapters systematically examining provincial democracy in all provinces in Argentina, Brazil, India, and Russia (from 1994 to 2004); structured withincountry comparisons of 11 provinces in Argentina, Brazil, India, and Mexico; and a historical study of subnational democratization in the American South. Illiberal Practices has many virtues; here are but three. The first is its focus on a more subtle, and common, mode of subnational politics. The volume illustrates the serious costs of employing binary regime categories of democratic or authoritarian (as I myself have done). Second, the contributors are right to move beyond the formal institutional features of subnational governance and emphasize informal institutions. Third, they offer a wealth of much-needed descriptive inferences about ISAP, ranging from the exploration of expert survey data to the richness of the 11 case studies of provincial-level politics. The volume opens with an excellent chapter in which Edward Gibson and Desmond King explain both the failure of post–Civil War Reconstruction to secure democratic rule in the American South and the success of the so-called Second Reconstruction with reference to changes in federalism. However, while federalism is crucial, the authors may overstate its importance. Reconstruction’s failure may have been less contingent and more structural in nature than they imagine, especially regarding the failure to transform the southern political economy. Regarding the second period, invoking “federalism” as a cause produces a shallow account that cannot tell us why changes in federalism occurred, and thus makes it hard to understand why the Second Reconstruction happened when it did. Next, in one of the best chapters, Maya Tudor and Adam Ziegfeld explain the timing of the consolidation of subnational democratization in India—operationalized here as the electoral triumph and completion of a full term in office by an opposition party. Through a comparison of four carefully chosen states, the authors show that differences in their preindependence political mobilizations produced different ideational and organizational resources on which opposition forces would subsequently have to draw to defeat the dominant Congress Party in the decades after independence. Jacqueline Behrend finds that federal intervention in a subset of Argentine provinces is hardly sufficient for overcoming ISAP. While it is difficult to understand fully the consequences of federal interventions without studying provinces that have not experienced such interventions, Behrend does find that new hegemonies can emerge under different party labels. Also studying Argentina, Carlos Gervasoni demonstrates the usefulness of expert surveys, especially for illuminating the harder-to-measure informal features of politics that are often idiosyncratic to individual provinces. Along with the Varieties of Democracy (V-DEM) project, Gervasoni’s is the most careful effort to measure systematically the different dimensions of subnational political rule. He shows that these dimensions are weakly correlated with one another. While rights of inclusion and democratic contestation are generally well protected, many provinces feature weak