UCLA

Do opposition-led subnational governments reduce opportunities for the national government to undermine democracy? Over 89% of democratic country-years after 1990 consist of multilevel democracies. Control over subnational government provides opposition parties with state resources and visibility, which allow them to: (a) become more competitive in national elections, (b) incentivize office-seeking MPs to exert more legislative constraints, and (c) ultimately reduce executive aggrandizement. Leveraging close races for highest subnational executive office in Latin America (1990–2021), I find that oppositions experience electoral gains of 17 percentage points in national legislative elections in states they marginally won. At the country level, I employ panel models and the newly assembled Subnational Elections Database — the largest dataset on subnational election outcomes, which covers results from 84 democracies (1990–2021). These analyses reveal that subnational opposition control, even in unitary countries, increases horizontal accountability and reduces aggrandizement in the form of constitutional violations. Overall, in stark contrast to subnational governments as “laboratories against democracy” in the U.S. in recent years (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018; Grumbach 2022), this research illustrates that oppositions since 1990 have better protected democracy against executive aggrandizement when they exerted more subnational control.