Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Measuring and Explaining Differences in Subnational Democracy in the Argentine Provinces

主要调查人员:迈克尔·j·Coppedge和卡洛斯GervasoniTitle:博士论文研究政治学:测量和解释不同的地方性的阿根廷的民主Provinces0719658AbstractWhat广泛的原因是不同级别的地方单位的国家级的民主联邦民主国家?从阿根廷到巴西再到印度，皿煮和不皿煮的邦/省并存。根据民主的财政和食利者理论，我假设，通过将税收收入不成比例地重新分配给更贫穷或人口较少的地方单位，联邦政府向这些地区的地方现任者提供了巨额租金，而这些租金往往被用来扼杀民主。租金也使现任者在财政上独立于他们的选民，从而减少对他们的责任。我用阿根廷的证据来评估这一假设，这是一种“政治上倒退的财政联邦制”。因变量“地方民主”将通过对阿根廷24个省的政治专家的调查来衡量。拟议的调查借鉴了在专家评估和二手资料的基础上对国家进行编码的国家级指数的传统，首次将其扩展到次国家单位，并通过使用多种编码和采用丰富和多维的民主概念对其进行改进。接受采访的专家是当地政治上独立的学者和记者。问卷中的每个项目将由各省三到五位专家进行评估。调查结果将用于构建各省的民主指数。财政/食利者假说和其他假说的解释力将通过混合方法战略进行评估，将统计分析与定性案例研究相结合。回归分析将估计每个解释因素的相对强度和理论模型的拟合优度。这些定量证据将用于选择四个定性案例研究，这将允许追踪工作中的因果过程并改进原始理论模型。对于关键但被忽视的地方民主维度，有四项创新：1)将财政/食利者理论应用于地方单位，2)将租金概念从自然资源扩展到财政联邦制收入，3)首次在任何国家的所有地方单位中对民主进行全面衡量，以及4)通过对专家的调查改进国家层面指数的原始操作化。这些创新可以推广到其他联邦民主国家和其他政策驱动的食利者情况。本研究的更广泛影响包括：1)重大的公共政策影响，因为研究结果将为设计经济和政治上进步的财政联邦制制度指明道路；2)促进美国和阿根廷学者之间的伙伴关系；3)对新的操作策略、新的数据集以及有希望的原创和正确的实质性结论的学科贡献，所有这些都将通过出版物和网站传播。更广泛地说，这项研究有望引起人们的注意，并帮助纠正年轻的联邦民主国家中不民主的地方局势。

Primary Investigators: Michael J. Coppedge and Carlos GervasoniTitle: Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Measuring and Explaining Differences in Subnational Democracy in the Argentine Provinces0719658AbstractWhat are the causes of widely different levels of democracy in the subnational units of national-level federal democracies? From Argentina to Brazil to India, democratic and less democratic states/provinces coexist side by side. Drawing on fiscal and rentier theories of democracy, I hypothesize that, by redistributing tax revenues disproportionally in favor of poorer or less populated subnational units, federal governments provide local incumbents in these districts with hefty rents that often are used to stifle democracy. Rents also make incumbents fiscally independent from, and consequently less accountable to, their constituencies. I assess this hypothesis using evidence from Argentina, a case of this type of "politically regressive fiscal federalism." The dependent variable, subnational democracy, will be measured through a survey of experts on the politics of each of the 24 Argentine provinces. The proposed survey draws on the tradition of national-level indices that code countries on the basis of expert assessments and secondary sources, extends it for the first time to subnational units, and improves on it by using multiple coders and by adopting a thick and multidimensional conceptualization of democracy. The experts to be interviewed are local, politically independent scholars and journalists. Each item in the questionnaire will be assessed by three to five experts per province. The results will be used to construct an index of democracy for each province. The explanatory power of the fiscal/rentier hypothesis and of alternative hypotheses will be assessed through a mixed-methods strategy, combining statistical analysis with qualitative case-studies. Regression analysis will estimate the relative strength of each explanatory factor and the goodness-of-fit of the theoretical model. This quantitative evidence will be used to select four qualitative case studies, which will permit to trace the causal processes at work and to refine the original theoretical model. Four innovations are contributed to the key but neglected subnational dimension of democracy: 1) the application of fiscal/rentier theories to subnational units, 2) the extension of the concept of rents from natural resources to fiscal federalism revenues, 3) the first thick measurement of democracy in all the subnational units of any country, and 4) an original operationalization through a survey of experts that improves on national-level indices. These innovations are generalizable to other federal democracies and to other policy-driven rentier situations. The broader impacts of this research include: 1) significant public policy implications, as the findings would point the way toward the design of economically and politically progressive institutions of fiscal federalism, 2) the fostering of partnership between scholars in the US and Argentina, and 3) the contribution to the discipline of a novel operationalization strategy, a new dataset, and hopefully original and correct substantive conclusions, all of which will be disseminated through publications and a web site. More generally, this research is expected to bring attention to and help redress less-than-democratic subnational situations in young federal democracies.