I thank Behrend and Whitehead for their careful engagement with my book, and offer responses to their conceptual discussion and a few broader thoughts about subnational democracy, past and future.

Behrend and Whitehead avoid the term “authoritarian,” opting instead for “ISAP.” As their volume shows, binary regime conceptions like mine throw away useful information. But hair splitting can be costly, too. It is telling that most of their contributors do not follow the editors’ guidance to avoid writing in terms of subnational authoritarianism. Indeed, their volume’s chapter on southern states labels them “authoritarian” (p. 33). I think their own contributors and I are onto something. Southern authoritarianism endured, on one periodization, from 1607 to the 1960s, and on another from 1890 to the 1960s. This durability suggests that these states were marked by much more than mere ISAP. Additionally, as Ed Gibson and I show, federal officeholders regularly acquiesce to subnational authoritarians, whether due to indifference or their own inability to resist them given their other goals. Either the gains of deploying the term “authoritarian enclave” to think about southern states outweighs the costs of doing so, or they do not. How calling them “authoritarian” affects how Behrend and Whitehead or others feel about the national parties, or the New Deal, is very much beside the point. Finally, I show that southern rulers built and managed often-vulnerable coalitions and were frustrated by the mismatch of their own goals with their institutional resources. This hardly counts as evidence against the authoritarian moniker. The last decade of research on authoritarian regimes has demolished the assumption that “authoritarian” means “strong” or “unchallenged.” Authoritarian political actors are political actors, too.

I’m confused by Behrend and Whitehead’s comment that undemocratic, subnational, state-level politics is not . . . subnational. Yes, subnational rulers and southern federal officeholders successfully prevailed upon federal institutions to give states and localities a wide berth in constructing their own politics. Of course, not all states chose as Southerners did. Behrend and Whitehead seem to confuse the forces that brought southern polities into being (ambitious politicians acting on behalf of clients backing a racialized, repressive political economy) with the broader conditions that allowed them to exist (a particular type of federalism).

Behrend and Whitehead do not critique my (very critiquable) accounts of different types of democratization. That decision reflects a deeper difference between our two projects. Where I attempt to craft causal explanations, they abjure questions of why in favor of those about how. Their focus on “pathways” by which polities marked by ISAP might democratize sidesteps the issue of why processes such as “control” or “conditionality” occur. They choose not to argue for the relative causal importance of political-economic forces, social structure, elite conflict, or mass mobilizations, or to develop a theory of subnational democratization. My book certainly does not provide such a theory, but it is vital that we do so, as the contemporary United States again might demonstrate.

What is the likelihood of a return to the past? As Steven Levitsky, Lucan Ahmad Way, and I argue, America’s current crisis is caused in large part by the forces of elite polarization and negative partisanship, and these threats to democratic stability were ironically unleashed by the South’s democratization in the 1970s. A partial decentralization of voting rights enforcement and other safeguards of democratic rule would likely result in patterned differences across the country. Thus, while the threat to democracy may emanate from the national level, it will be the characteristics of subnational jurisdictions that will determine whether states and perhaps even cities constitute enclaves of vibrant, democratic rule or jurisdictions riddled with ISAP. Conceptual distinctions about the nature of the problem are important, but so are developing theories to explain subnational variation. Backsliding in the United States would force us to interpret the past half century as the only period in U.S. history in which democratic rule characterized the entire country, a dire thought indeed.