Robert Mickey’s review is thoughtful and helpful, and we agree with most of his comments, many of which reflect his deep expertise on the U.S. South. His case is an outlier at one end of our spectrum, with Russia at the other end. Across this full range it is challenging to find a precise—and ideally measurable—definition of subnational illiberal structures and practices (ISAPs) that distinguishes them sharply from authoritarian enclaves, as he recommends.

A key source of this difficulty (which is also present in the binary classification subnational authoritarianism/authoritarian enclaves vs. subnational democracy) is that we are dealing with two-level politics. The coexistence of a democracy at the federal level and something different at the subnational level adds a layer of imprecision that is not resolved through Edward Gibson’s (Boundary Control: Subnational Authoritarianism in Federal Democracies, 2012) idea of “regime juxtaposition.” These definitional problems are as much present in the concept of “authoritarian enclaves” as they are in that of “illiberal structures and practices.” In a recent article, we address some of these definitional issues by distinguishing between illiberal and antidemocratic practices (see Jacqueline Behrend and Laurence Whitehead “Prácticas iliberales y antidemocráticas a nivel subnacional: Enfoques comparados,” Colombia Internacional 91: 17–43, 2017). ISAPs are diffuse but embedded and can produce a low-intensity democracy without ever producing full authoritarianism. Antidemocratic practices more directly clash with the national level of democracy and, under certain circumstances, may lead to authoritarian enclaves. But much depends on how they combine with other structures and practices, institutions, and federal dynamics. Between subnational authoritarian enclaves and fully democratic subnational units, we found various intermediate categories that can be very enduring and harmful to overall democracy. V. O. Key outlined his variant of an ISAP in Chapter 1 of Southern Politics in State and Nation (1949).

We mapped different pro-democratic pathways, but we agree that negative trajectories deserve equal attention. The positive cases arise when social movements and opposition parties activate existing democratic institutions, through interaction between latent internal resources and support from other provinces/states or the federal government. Most of the ISAPs restricting democracy in our study are not as formal as in the U.S. South. ISAPs can be just as durable as authoritarian enclaves without ever moving in either a democratic or a more authoritarian direction. How pro-democratic demonstration effects are received will indeed depend on the specific activation resources (and authoritarian obstacles) present in particular subnational settings.

These two books are very complementary. Mickey’s book examines one strong case in depth, whereas our volume ranges across the many other intermediate situations that can exist at the subnational level. Overall, we find more cases of ISAPs than of outright authoritarianism, although our Russia case highlights the negative possibilities. We also find that typically federal intervention is not enough to force subnational democratization, despite the apparent U.S. exception.

We agree that both subnational processes and federal structures need to be understood in order to explain the alternative pathways. We also agree that measurement is important—and can aid conceptual refinement. Indeed, our volume contains two chapters (on Argentina and Russia) that provide original in-country indicators of territorial variance. But these measures of subnational democracy also have their limitations, because they do not allow us to see in which direction things are moving or how stable ISAPs are. Unless we repeat them regularly, these measures can be unreliable from a comparative-historical standpoint, which is the perspective that Mickey’s book also adopts. The bigger challenge is to develop measurements that can be standardized between as well as within countries—no easy task when, for example, the population of India is 30 times that of Argentina (even though we only consider “large” federal democracies). One promising initiative under consideration is to develop multidimensional maps of each state within Mexico, as a preliminary step toward internationally standardized mapping.