Levels of democratization within many countries lag behind national trends. A growing literature looks at the persistence of these “subnational authoritarian regimes” or “dominant party enclaves” and their implications for policy making and democratic consolidation. Yet we know little about how citizens perceive politics in these regions and whether patterns of political participation and accountability there differ from more competitive regions of uneven democracies.

Jonathan Hiskey and Mason Moseley’s important new book fills this gap. They develop a theory of party behavior that emphasizes how elites use control of the state to enrich themselves and reward supporters while manipulating institutions in a way that tilts elections in their favor. They theorize that these strategies change how citizens see and interact with the state. In states where economic resources are dominated by the state, citizens will become desensitized to corruption and orient their participation toward extracting resources for themselves. Citizens who lack confidence that elections will be fair are likely to be less willing to challenge the regime or to hold it accountable for bad governance. Finally, citizens living in a weak democracy despite national-level promises of democratic representation may grow more accepting of undemocratic behaviors and disenchanted with the idea of political democracy.

Hiskey and Moseley test these arguments using survey data from Argentina and Mexico collected by the Latin American Public Opinion Project between 2008 and 2014. They compare states/provinces where the same party has ruled the territory since democratization to territories where turnover has occurred. They document that one-party dominance can occur at all levels of economic development but are careful to control for the state’s level of development and for a wide variety of individual-level confounders. Each chapter tests one of the central propositions of their theory, and the results largely conform to expectations.

Their findings suggest that citizens living in dominant-party enclaves have very different interactions with the state than do their fellow citizens residing in more competitive contexts. They are more likely to have been asked to pay a bribe and to have been offered money in exchange for their vote. Evidence from four Mexican states where data are available before and after the dominant party lost shows that corruption victimization declines with the transition to a new regime. Although corruption victimization in multiparty regions of Argentina and Mexico correlates with a belief that the government is corrupt, corruption victimization does not make citizens believe that the government is corrupt in dominant-party enclaves, which suggests that they have internalized corruption as part of the political process.

Democratic attitudes also diverge between dominant-party enclaves and multiparty ones. Although there are no differences in support for political participation or in tolerating participation by those who are critical of the regime, respondents in dominant-party regimes are less likely to support limits on executive action and to say that democracy is the best system of government. Living in a nondemocratic regime seems to make people sour on democratic institutions.

Patterns of political participation also diverge across regions in a way that is consistent with the authors’ expectations. Levels of turnout are roughly comparable, but whereas we see a positive association between education and turnout in multiparty regimes, education has a negative association with turnout in dominant-party regions. Contact with elected officials and public participation in party meetings are higher in dominant-party regions than in multiparty ones, a difference driven by increased participation by ruling-party supporters in those regions. The ruling-party supporters are more likely to protest in dominant-party regions, whereas opposition-party supporters are less likely to protest there than are opposition voters in more competitive regions.

Finally, political accountability is attenuated in dominant-party regions. In both state and national elections, voters’ evaluations of the national economy or of government effectiveness in managing health care or fighting crime are less strongly associated with support for the ruling party in dominant-party regions than in multiparty ones.

These findings will interest scholars of subnational regimes because they illuminate both the pathways by which they work and their potential consequences on citizens. In doing the latter, however, they also lay down important markers for the broader study of democratic values. Hiskey and Moseley provide strong evidence that attitudes and patterns of political behavior evolve differently in nondemocratic contexts, which raises the possibility that political culture is not a cause of democratization but is its effect. Their work also calls into question the idea of a “national culture” by showing that there can be substantial systematic deviations in fundamental political attitudes and behaviors within countries. This finding should encourage more scholars to look at subnational variations in attitudes and, as Hiskey and Moseley argue in their conclusion, for surveys to be designed in a way that facilitates inferences about subnational units.

In addition, even though the analyses are sophisticated and leverage subgroup differences to isolate potential causal mechanisms, the book is also very accessible. Hiskey and Moseley nest their analyses inside a larger narrative about cases; each chapter begins with illustrative vignettes of subnational authoritarian actors behaving in ways the model describes and with interviews of opposition activists that illustrate the challenges those actions created. These vignettes enrich the data analysis and also enhance the book’s value for students and area specialists.

The largest question this book leaves unanswered is about the causal nature of the patterns that the authors document. Although attitudes and behaviors clearly diverge between dominant-party and multiparty contexts, it is unclear whether this difference is caused by those contexts or is reinforced by them. The difficulty in establishing causality also raises questions about how quickly attitudes and behaviors will change if the party system were to change. The authors acknowledge this difficulty; two chapters present four cases in Mexico that transitioned from dominant-party rule during the survey window to show that these changes resulted in reduced corruption victimization and increased support for some democratic norms. Unfortunately, they do not use these data in the other two chapters on patterns of accountability and participation. Thus we cannot know how fast these behaviors change when democracy emerges. Patterns of participation in newly democratic regions would have been especially interesting to document to see whether stripping former ruling parties of state resources changes their ability to mobilize supporters and whether patterns of participation become less instrumental.

I also wanted more information about the opposition-party supporters in dominant-party enclaves; the former are individuals who have reasons to switch their allegiance but do not. Are they more strongly partisan than supporters of the same parties in more competitive regions? Do they have more extreme issue preferences that make them unwilling to switch allegiances? Are they a residual category of apolitical individuals? Much of the analysis of subnational authoritarian regimes focuses on the ruling party, but Hiskey and Moseley’s microlevel data potentially provide a window into the dynamics of where opposition to the regime is concentrated.

These open questions do not undercut, however, the fundamental importance of this book for scholars of democratization, political culture, and comparative political behavior. Hiskey and Moseley provide clear evidence that behaviors diverge across contexts and that these behaviors have implications for how democracies are likely to develop in the future. Scholars and practitioners will leave this book with a greater understanding both of why democratization is hard and of the high costs of failing to fully consolidate it.