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, less-than-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 within-country 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 checks and balances, “sophisticated ways of undermining contestation, and significant (if subtle) violations of liberal rights” (p. 156).

Through analysis of all Brazilian states, Andre Borges explores the complex causes and consequences of party nationalization on the country’s less democratic provinces. He finds that national parties “can play only a limited role in the promotion of subnational democratization and in the nationalization of politics” (p. 191). His case study of Rio Grande do Norte offers fascinating material on the importance of prominent political “families” in sustaining ISAP. Celina Souza asks how authoritarian politics in Brazil’s state of Bahia persisted well after the country’s national-level democratization and only began to fade after 2006. She argues that federal social policy provision—especially antipoverty programs—helped end the DEM party’s dominance over public and private goods provision and thereby weaken its electoral hegemony. In so doing, she suggests a new “policy-led” mode of subnational democratization to join Edward Gibson’s modes of democratization driven either by the center or the national parties.

Julian Durazo Herrmann offers a fascinating study of two Mexican enclaves, Oaxaca and Puebla. In comparing the causes and consequences of neopatrimonial practices on the persistence and decay of these enclaves, he offers the volume’s most sustained argument about the importance of social structure on the rise and fall of subnational ISAP. Finally, Inga Saikonnen seeks to explain variation across Russia’s regions. Drawing on expert ratings, she finds that more socioeconomically developed regions are more likely to have featured democratic political contestation. However, co-opted by the United Russia Party through the center’s dominance of gubernatorial elections, by the mid-2000s the regions had converged on electoral authoritarian governance. She argues that subnational electoral authoritarianism has played a key role in the demise of Russia’s democratic experiment.

As this whirlwind tour (save for the introduction and conclusion, discussed later) suggests, Illiberal Practices raises critical issues for the growing subfield of subnational politics. Here I mention only a few:

How prevalent are subnational ISAP in federal democracies? The editors seem to be correct that ISAP are more common than durable pockets of “outright” authoritarianism, and the volume’s systematic data from Argentina and Russia support their claim. The field needs to get a better sense of this phenomenon worldwide. The impressive V-DEM data set constructed by Kelly McMann and colleagues is critical here, but Illiberal Practices suggests that the measurement of informal institutions that sustain ISAP is also imperative.

ISAP or authoritarian enclaves? The boundaries between the two are understandably fuzzy. Especially when considering those jurisdictions in which illiberal practices are reproduced and “ascendan[t] over time” (pp. 10–11), how do they remain different from subnational authoritarian regimes? If provinces featuring ISAP are less durable than authoritarian enclaves, the editors’ language about reproduction is in tension with this claim.

Prying apart concepts and explanations. The editors suggest that while enclaves are best understood by focusing on national/subnational dynamics, examining ISAP allows us to concentrate on indigenous features of provincial politics (p. 299). I do not think matters are so clear. While Gibson explains the rise and fall of enclaves in terms of federal dynamics, these dynamics are themselves driven by causal forces rooted at the subnational level, as are the failures of formal institutions to perform adequately. These provincial-level characteristics include political economy, sociocultural cleavages, and so on. Conversely, ISAP provinces must be explained by attending to more than just “local factors” (p. 5). Indeed, the volume highlights the conditions under which interventions from the center destabilize, or reinforce, ISAP. And the editors’ suggestion of a “contagion” pathway of subnational democratization (p. 308) seems in tension with the claim that our explanations must emphasize the particulars of provincial-level politics. I do not think we yet know that ISAP and outright authoritarianism must be explained differently; we need to understand federal dynamics and province-level features to understand both.

ISAP and democratic responsiveness. The volume points out that such responsiveness is often hampered not by a stable power structure but instead by a provincial state apparatus that is insufficiently autonomous from social forces (p. 7). This insight lies in tension with Sebastián Mazzuca’s claim that the exercise of power is irrelevant to our conception of democracy. If democracy implies responsiveness to the citizenry, then the state must be efficacious enough to respond.

Pathways in other directions? This volume productively explores pathways of subnational democratization. But if provinces featuring ISAP are often not deeply rooted, what are the pathways by which they might move to outright authoritarianism?

Democratic enclaves? Elsewhere, Kelly McMann finds that two-thirds of hybrid national regimes had uneven enforcement of civil liberties at the provincial level. This points to the need to take seriously the possibility of the emergence of democratic enclaves in nondemocratic regimes, as suggested earlier by Bruce Gilley.

Moving beyond ISAP’s causes. How might we think about the consequences of ISAP? How do they shape federal politics, or politics in other provinces? Edward Gibson and I have pointed to the impact of these provinces on national politics, and on the corrosion of rights in some provinces on those in others, but not in any systematic way.

These are exciting—if disturbing—times for studying territorial unevenness in democracies, and Illiberal Practices is an invaluable guide. Readers who wrestle with its many insights and perspectives, as well as the many questions it raises, will be very glad they did.