Economic foundations of subnational authoritarianism: insights and evidence from qualitative and quantitative research

A growing body of subnational comparative research on democracy has focused attention on ‘subnational authoritarianism’, in tandem with increasing interest in local politics across the developing world. Unsurprisingly, this evolving field of study has been characterized by a diversity – if not a dichotomy – of approaches, with quantitative and qualitative research proceeding along parallel and sometimes intersecting tracks. But scholars working in diverse contexts and with diverging approaches have begun to converge on a set of explanations for the patterns of variance observed in subnational authoritarianism within and across national settings. Drawing on studies of Russia, the United States, southern Italy, Argentina and West Africa, this article shows how scholarship has identified the underlying economic foundations of subnational authoritarianism. Combining the findings of recent qualitative and quantitative studies with the author's own research in the Philippines, this article spells out a set of hypotheses which may help to explain patterns of variance in subnational authoritarianism. Variance in subnational authoritarianism, it is suggested, stems from varying local economic conditions and possibilities for accumulation and maintenance of control over local economies. Further ‘mapping’ of subnational authoritarianism thus requires local fieldwork to complement the strengths – and overcome the limitations – of quantitative research.


Introduction
Over the past decade, scholarly interest in local politics in the developing world has reached levels not seen since the early -mid 1970s, when anthropologists and political scientists stopped working on patron -client relations, political machines, factions and feuds, and other such staple topics in what was hitherto a flourishing realm of research. After almost two decades of neglect, by the early 1990s, globalization, democratization, and decentralization began to spur a revival and expansion of academic interest in local politics across the world. In considerable measure, this interest reflects developments and trends to be Today, by contrast, with subnational comparative research on democracy emerging as a vibrant field of study, we are experiencing the crystallization of a shared language and frame of reference for this fertile field of intellectual production. 4 By now, scholars are working on subnational democracy in countries as diverse as Argentina, Indonesia, Mexico, and Russia and reading and referencing each other's work as they proceed. 5 To be sure, this emerging body of literature is still characterized by disagreement and diversity with regard to terminology, with some scholars writing on 'subnational authoritarianism', local 'authoritarian enclaves', or provincial 'closed games', while others, perhaps mindful of broader debates on authoritarianism and democracy and distrustful of false dichotomies, refer to 'hybrid regimes' and the 'unevenness of democracy' at the local level instead. Even the term 'subnational authoritarianism' appears to resist definition, with authors typically neglecting to stipulate the distinguishing features of such a local regime.
Nonetheless, scholars engaged in subnational comparative research on democracy do appear to concur on two crucial points. First, echoing earlier scholarship on machine politics in the United States and elsewhere, these scholars have observed that subordination of state power to elected officials, and devolution of local state power to locally elected officials, under democracy (and decentralization) provides a hospitable environment for the emergence and entrenchment of subnational forms of politics and power which are less than fully 'democratic' and which may even be 'authoritarian'. This seemingly ironic outcome of transitions to democracy at the national level is especially evident insofar as it unfolds during a relatively early phase of capitalist development, when the broad mass of the population remains poor, insecure, and vulnerable to clientelist inducements and/or coercive pressures, when property rights are weakly established, and when the state still plays a central role in the economy. Among the recurring and recognizable patterns of local politics which have been observed to crystallize and endure in such contexts is the 'subnational authoritarian' regime. Here we can define 'subnational authoritarianism' as a local regime in which the local offices and agencies of the state have been captured by a single locally based individual, family, clan, clique, or organization, who enjoys and exercises the discretionary powers and resources of the state outside effective democratic accountability, electoral challenge, and the rule of law.
Second, as they have read each other's work and recognized insights on local politics that travel across national and regional borders, this new generation of scholars engaged in subnational comparative research on democracy has focused attention on the key task of examining and explaining patterns of subnational variance. Edward Gibson, in a landmark 2005 article, identified the major challenge facing such scholars. 'The political topographies of subnational jurisdictions', he noted, 'are still largely the unexplored territories of comparative politics, particularly for developing and postcommunist countries. The study of democratization within nations has suffered considerably from this gap'. 6 Although comparative analysis of subnational variance is arguably more methodologically plausible and intellectually promising than cross-national work, 7 considerable obstacles have impeded the development of an omnibus approach. Quantitative studies of local politics are often based on data of dubious validity and reliability, and measurements of 'subnational democracy' and 'subnational authoritarianism' are difficult to develop. Moreover, any attempt to identify variations in levels or quality of subnational democracy must 'look beyond the formal institutional structure and measure the actual power dynamics at work in subnational political systems'. 8 Qualitative studies, moreover, are typically so focused on so few localities as to constrain the possibilities for extrapolation and evaluation of hypotheses across a national terrain, much less beyond. Meanwhile, the contexts within which subnational democracy and authoritarianism are being studied are typically ones of early post-authoritarianism and ongoing economic and institutional change, thus limiting scholars' ability to generate hypotheses that withstand the test of time, even in the localities they study. The conditions for subnational democracy and authoritarianism in Russia, for example, have changed from the Yeltsin years to the Putin era, as they have in post-authoritarian Indonesia since the belated shift to direct elections of local regents (bupati) in 2004.
Finally, in terms of the varying nature and extent of subnational authoritarianism itself across countries, there remains the possibility that patterns of variance in one country follow a different logic from those in another. If forms of subnational authoritarianism themselves vary, then perhaps the crucial determinants of cacique entrenchment in Uruguay are not the same as those for clan survival in Uzbekistan. If scholars find it so difficult to explain patterns of local politics in one country, how can we expect them to explain patterns across the world? If scholars do not fully agree on definitions or measurements of 'subnational authoritarianism', how can we begin to explore the possibilities for comparative analysis of this elusive, ambiguous phenomenon?
Insights and evidence from Russia, Italy, the United States, and Argentina Happily enough, over the past decade scholars have begun to overcome these obstacles and to identify ways to explain patterns of variance in subnational democracy and authoritarianism, as seen in recent studies of subnational authoritarianism in post-Soviet Russia. On the one hand, Kelly McMann, in her comparative study of two oblasti in Russia (and two additional localities in Kyrgyzstan) has linked contrasting patterns of local 'autocracy' and 'democracy' to structural features of the local economy, in particular the varying levels of what she terms 'economic autonomy'. 'The degree of personal economic autonomy determines a citizen's willingness to challenge local authorities or, alternatively, to practice self-censorship', she argues. The extent of personal economic autonomy, in turn, she concludes, is shaped by environmental economic autonomy: 'opportunities in a province for earning income beyond the reach of local authorities'. 9 Thus, for example, in Ul'ianovsk, a local businessman is cited as telling McMann: 'There is a monopoly held by the governor's entourage. One hundred percent. If you want to create a business -a business in a new sphere that is not part of [their] monopoly -officials will simply say "No"'. 10 Local constraints on economic autonomy, moreover, operate indirectly on individual citizens through the local structures of political authority and economic dependency within which they are enfolded. Protected local monopolies not only prevent competition and punish would-be challengers; they also limit consumers' choices and thus impose higher costs on them for goods and services. Entrenched subnational authoritarian rulers likewise use economic powers and resources to pre-empt competition and punish rival candidates for local office; they control 'locked-in electorates' by imposing economic costs and penalties on local vote brokers -and the voters they mobilize -who defect from incumbent local administrations. As noted in an account of local elections in the Russian Republic of Bashkortostan in the 1990s, regional leaders do often achieve electoral successes by means of rigging and fraud. However, state leaders can also use more subtle means, for example, actual and implied, but credible 'threat reprisals against districts that do not vote their way'. 11 In other words, following McMann, we can map subnational authoritarianism through analysis of local political economies -in terms of opportunities for employment, investment, production and circulation of goods, and accumulation and concentration of capital. Variance in subnational authoritarianism corresponds to local constellations of economic power, with subnational authoritarian rulers' success in entrenching and perpetuating themselves in power contingent on their ability to constrain the economic autonomy of citizens, voters, local state agents, vote-brokers, and would-be challengers. By this logic, local economic conditions are determinant of local political outcomes, and thus a mapping of local political economies is in order.
On the other hand, Henry Hale, in a survey of machine politics across early post-Soviet Russia, suggests a very different argument about variance in subnational authoritarianism. For Hale, success in constructing a local political machine in early post-Soviet Russia depended less on pre-existing local economic structures than on the capacity of local politicians to make maximum use of available -local and supra-local -opportunities: 'While economic structure and concentration is sometimes treated as an independent variable influencing governor power, it is important to note that governors themselves typically possessed a good deal of influence over how their economies came to be arranged through the reform process'. 12 '[T]he Soviet socioeconomic inheritance and postcommunist transition', he notes, 'left regional authorities in possession of a large number of (. . .) opportunities to build powerful political machines, opportunities that did not have to be taken and that thus depended to at least some extent on the capacities of the governors themselves'. 13 Thus subnational authoritarian rulers may create economic contexts, rather than vice versa, and, crucially, they may do so using not only subnational economic resources, but supra-local resources as well: Any political machines that governors controlled by the end of the 1990s (. . .) had to have been built either by themselves or by their predecessors in the period after the start of these reforms. Their success in this endeavour depended in part on different elements of their personal experiences and skills, as well as personal drive and capacities. Governors were in many ways still dependent on the federal center for resources throughout the 1990s, frequently relying on (negotiated) federal allocations, 'loans' that were not expected to be repaid, and underpriced energy supplies. 14 In contrast with McMann's emphasis on the determining role of local economic context for enabling local 'autocracy', Hale stresses both individual agency and supra-or extra-local opportunities and resources. Economic conditions are not given, but constructed, by supra-local circumstances and interactions between local and supra-local politicians. Thus mapping local political economies is insufficient for determining the possibilities for subnational authoritarian rule. Tracing the processes by which local political economies are themselves constructed is also necessary.
How can we extrapolate from these different approaches? Perhaps we should re-examine scholarship on subnational democracy and authoritarianism from an earlier era and on settings rather closer to home, most notably the rich literature on machine politics in the United States and the Christian Democratic (DC) machine and the mafia in southern Italy, which has long been suggestive with regard to the economic context for 'subnational authoritarianism'. V.O. Key's monumental 1949 study of the American South, for example, showed how the diverse forms of Democratic Party dominance found in different Southern states and counties were coloured by varying constellations of economic activities and interests. 15 Thus, Key noted, the gentlemanly and efficient workings of the entrenched Byrd machine in Virginia, and the 'respectable' operations of the Simmons machine and then the Shelby Dynasty in North Carolina suited local oligarchies of manufacturing and banking interests in these states, while the colourfully seamy rule of Huey and Russell Long in Louisiana was enabled by a unique combination of state control over petroleum production and gambling concessions. 16 In a later quantitative study covering the entire United States, David Mayhew likewise suggested that local environments were crucial for providing state-level 'traditional party organizations' with the necessary resources to maintain autonomy from pressure groups, a finding recently revisited in a treatment of oil-rich Louisiana and Texas. 17 Since the 1970s, similar appreciation of economic context has also been evident in the study of American urban politics, with economic sociologists writing about 'growth machines' in American cities and developing a 'political economy of place'. 18 More recent studies have linked the enduring local monopolies established by both political machines and avowed 'reformers' in American cities to coalitions of local economic interests, delineating regional patterns in urban politics that correspond to varying constellations of business interests and histories of economic development. 19 Meanwhile, McMann's arguments about economic autonomy find resonance in Judith Chubb's 1982 study of the Sicilian city of Palermo. In a fine-grained account of enduring DC Party machine control over the local bureaucracy, manipulation of the regulatory environment for local business, protection of the local mafia, and domination over poor residents of Palermo's slums and housing projects in the early postwar era, Chubb emphasized not delivery of benefits or satisfaction of demands along conventional 'clientelist' lines, but rather the accumulation of a monopolistic position in the city's economy as the 'essence' of DC's power. 20 Chubb's argument clearly resonates with that of McMann on economic autonomy: A key variable underlying DC power in Palermo is the economic structure of the city and the social fragmentation associated with it, which impede the aggregation of political demand and the organization of collective interests necessary for the emergence of an alternative model of political behaviour. The monopolization of economic resources in the hands of the DC is possible because of the absence of an autonomous resource base at the local level and the consequent dependence of the local economy on the resources of the state. Once all centers of both local and extralocal power are centralized in the hands of one party, an expanding stock of resources is no longer necessary; indeed, the power of the party rests rather on the manipulation of scarcity, on maintaining large numbers of people in competition for scarce resources, all of which are channelled through the party. 21 Crucial here is thus not only the absence of personal economic autonomy for Palermo residents that McMann would stress, but also the presence, extent, concentration, and monopoly of economic control in the hands of the DC machine. Economic autonomy, as McMann suggests, may be a necessary condition for local democracy, but its absence is not a sufficient condition for local autocracy. Concentration of economic power in the hands of a single individual, family, or organization is necessary as well.
But what explains subnational variance in the achievement and persistence of such a position of local economic control? In contrast with McMann's emphasis on inherited structures of the local economy, revisionist accounts of urban political machines in the United States follow Henry Hale in stressing the importance of supra-local constraints and opportunities. 22 'Intergovernmental alliances', Steven Erie has argued, were crucial both for the construction of early urban political machines in the nineteenth century, and for the varying success of urban bosses in sustaining machine rule into the latter half of the twentieth century: Urban machine building required vertical alliances to sympathetic state and national leaders, especially in the fragile gestation period, in order to monopolize public sector resources, starve factional opponents, and reward party functionaries and voters.
Vital to organizational consolidation was the monopoly of all public patronagecounty, state, and national as well as city -controlled by the machine's party in the metropolis. Each patronage cache could fuel a rival party faction. To cure the mischief of faction, would-be bosses had to be oligopolists, monopolizing the raw materials needed by their competitors. 23 Likewise it was only through negotiation of deals with neighbouring county machines, with state legislatures and governors, and with successive congressmen, senators, and presidents, that machines in cities like Chicago, Albany, and Pittsburgh did survive the New Deal in the 1930s, civil service reform in the 1940s and 1950s, mobilization by unions and minorities in the 1960s, and welfare programmes in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Their counterparts in New York, Jersey City, Boston, San Francisco, and Philadelphia, however, experienced transformation and reform. 24 Meanwhile, studies of local politics in southern Italy since Chubb's study of Palermo have similarly shown how changing national -and international -circumstances have enabled and impelled challenges to DC hegemony and mafia control in Sicily, while highlighting the supra-local context within which machine politicians and criminal networks emerged and evolved in the first place. 25 Understanding the making and unmaking of subnational authoritarianism thus requires not only a focus on agency, decision-making, and process, but also a wide-angle lens that situates localities within regional, national, and even international contexts.
What kind of broader analytical framework is thus suggested by recent scholarship on subnational authoritarianism in Russia, and by earlier and later scholarship on machine politics in southern Italy and the United States? Overall, the scholars cited above suggest two lines of comparative analysis. First, the emergence, entrenchment, and endurance of subnational authoritarianism are enabled and explained by concentration of economic control over a given locality in the hands of a single individual, family, clan, clique, or organization. Concentration of economic control in the hands of local state rulers enables the emergence, evolution, and entrenchment of subnational authoritarianism, by inhibiting competition and constraining 'voice' and 'exit' by citizens and voters, local state agents, votebrokers, and would-be challengers. Variance in subnational authoritarianism, in other words, should be understood through comparative analysis of local political economies.
Second, this scholarship suggests that accumulation, concentration, and monopolisation of economic control over a given locality are determined not only by the factor endowments and inherited economic structures of a given locality, but also through interactions between local powerbrokers and supra-local state authorities. On the one hand, local conditions may render a locality especially susceptible to subnational authoritarian rule: concentrations of land, natural resources, or industrial capital; opportunities for monopolistic control over commodity processing centres, markets, transportation chokepoints, or natural-resource enclaves; predominance of local state agencies in employment and asset ownership; economic activities, including illegalities, which are highly vulnerable to local state regulatory intervention. On the other hand, supra-local circumstances and interactions between local and supra-local authorities may prove decisive in transforming local economic conditions in ways conducive to subnational authoritarianism: allocation of state budgets and awarding of state loans, contracts, and monopoly concessions; preferential treatment by supra-local law-enforcement agencies and privileged access to supra-local state agencies; support for election campaigns, tolerance of electoral fraud and violence, and punitive treatment of rival candidates.
Evidence illustrating the explanatory power of these lines of comparative analysis can be found in recent studies of subnational authoritarianism in Argentina, a setting far from Russian, southern Italian, and North American shores. While federalism in Argentina has created opportunities for concentration of power in the hands of provincial governors, considerable variance has been observed in the subnational regimes found across the country's 23 provinces. On the one hand, scholars have attributed this variance to provincial economic conditions. One study, for example, linked 'extreme executive dominance' in San Luis to concentration of land in a unified local oligarchy, while attributing lively party competition and 'strong rule of law' in Mendoza to land settlement and cultivation patterns encouraging a fragmentation of economic resources among many families. 26 Another study treating two Argentine provinces' similarly linked provincial 'closed games' to local economic conditions: Closed games usually arise in provinces with a limited economic structure, a small population, and limited business opportunities. The political elite's families use the state to promote their economic interests and control access to business opportunities (companies owned by the political elite benefit from state contracts, its newspapers receive state advertisement, members of the economic elite hold government positions and control which industries receive tax benefits, subsidies, industrial promotion schemes or favourable loans from the provincial bank). 27 On the other hand, scholars have attributed variance in subnational regimes in Argentina to diverging and fluctuating patterns of linkage to the federal government, especially fiscal subsidies. As Carlos Gervasoni has shown, differences in subnational regimes across Argentine provinces co-vary closely with the magnitude and origin of their fiscal resources. In provinces with fiscal revenues mainly deriving from general taxation, 'the power of the state is limited by its dependence on the consent of economic actors'. In 'rentier provinces', however, fiscal revenues are largely independent from broad taxation. Here, 'the state is by far the main source of wealth'. 28 Rentier provinces, then, approach 'the least favourable circumstances' for competitive politics, that is, a situation in which 'violence and socioeconomic sanctions are exclusively available to the government and denied to the opposition'. Heavy federal subsidies are likely to induce the 'spending effect', that is, the use of budgets that are exceptionally large and unconstrained' to 'reduce dissent'. When the provincial state dominates the local economy, social actors are less autonomous and less politically demanding. The independent bourgeoisie, middle classes, or working classes that macrosocial analyses often see as driving movements toward democracy are typically weak in such state-dependent economies. In fact the causal arrow is often inverted in rentier states: classes are to a large extent shaped and even created by distributive policies aimed at generating support for the regime. In the rentier Argentine provinces the largest classes are public employees -bureaucrats, teachers, policemen -and informal or unemployed workers receiving some kind of provincial support. 29 Variance in federal fiscal support across Argentina's provinces, moreover, has been shown to reflect the varying and shifting interests of Argentine presidents in building 'vertical coalitions' with provincial governors heading 'subnational undemocratic regimes'. 30 As Gervasoni notes, research on Argentina suggests that differences in subnational democracy are to a large extent explained by a type of rentierism originating in central government redistribution of tax revenues among provinces. Governors in command of plentiful fiscal federalism rents appear to use their financial muscle to minimize their constituents' economic autonomy and, ultimately, to weaken democratic contestation and institutional constraints on their power. 31 Thus as in Russia, southern Italy, and the United States, scholarship on Argentina suggests the importance of local economic conditions on the one hand, and supralocal economic linkages on the other, for understanding patterns of variance in subnational authoritarianism.
The Philippines: a tale of two provinces To develop these lines of comparative analysis further, we can turn to yet another distant, unrelated setting, the Philippines. With competitive elections for municipal, city, and provincial executive offices and congressional seats persisting for more than 100 years, patterns of subnational variance in democracy and authoritarianism across the archipelago can be traced over many more decades than are observable in cases such as Russia or even Argentina. The author's research in the Philippines -including more than two years of fieldwork -also allows for a more in-depth analysis of provincial -and sub-provincial -patterns of variance in subnational authoritarianism than provided elsewhere. The findings allow not only for further confirmation of the two lines of argument outlined above, but also for exploration of two additional arguments.
Subnational authoritarianism has long been evident in the Philippines, and its broad contours are relatively easy to map from a distance. Competitive elections for local executive positions -municipal mayoralties and provincial governorships -and for congressional seats in the House of Representatives were established in the first decade of the twentieth century and have persisted to this day, remaining largely intact even during the country's brief experiment with authoritarian rule under President Ferdinand Marcos (1972 -1986). Analysis of election results, press reports, court documents, and other government records over the years reveals a clear pattern of subnational authoritarianism, with countless local politicians and so-called political dynasties enjoying uninterrupted control over mayoral, gubernatorial, and congressional seats for many decades, and abundant evidence of their reliance on coercive pressures -electoral violence, intimidation and fraud; assassinations of rivals and uncooperative underlings; and the maintenance of 'private armies' -to help maintain their local rule. 32 Virtually every province in the Philippines has experienced subnational authoritarianism, as the rosters of municipal and city mayors, provincial governors, and congressmen over the years suggest. But there is also ample variation: enduring political monopolies in some municipalities, cities, congressional districts, and provinces, but persistent factional competition in others. Some forms of local monopoly are more enduring -and/or less violent -than others. How to explain such variation in subnational authoritarianism in the Philippines?
Answers to this question are suggested by the two lines of argument outlined above and by comparative analysis of two provinces in the country, Cavite and Cebu, offering an interesting spectrum of variation in the nature and extent of subnational authoritarianism. These two provinces were selected as -suburban, industrializing -localities which could not be dismissed as 'outliers' in terms of geographical remoteness, economic backwardness, or monocrop culture. Cavite is located to the immediate south of the National Capital Region of Metro Manila; Cebu is an island province in the Western Visayas whose capital city serves as a key hub for interisland trade and transportation.
In both Cavite and Cebu, a systematic reading of decades of newspapers, Commission of Elections reports, and other documentation revealed cases of subnational authoritarianism over the course of the twentieth century at the municipal, congressional district, and provincial levels. Subnational authoritarianism was observable in the absence of turnover in mayoral, congressional, and gubernatorial elections over successive decades, and in journalistic coverage, official reports, and legal documentation of electoral fraud and violence, and other forms of coercion underlying the achievement and maintenance of power by incumbents. 33 In both Cavite and Cebu, there were -and today remain -municipalities and congressional districts where incumbent elected officials have constructed political machines and economic empires that have overcome challenges for decades at a time, with occasional periods of authoritarian entrenchment at the provincial level as well. But in both provinces, there was, especially at the municipal level, also evidence of the limitations of this pattern, with factional competition and turnover persisting in some localities even as local monopolists survived and prospered nearby.
Alongside these similarities between Cavite and Cebu, moreover, striking differences between the two provinces were also observable. In Cavite, individual mayors, congressmen, and governors have achieved and maintained authoritarian rule over their respective bailiwicks for decades, yet in no instance have such local bosses been able to pass on their political machines and economic empires to their children in dynastic form. Instead, the pattern of subnational authoritarian rule in Cavite was one of long tenure interrupted, abruptly and irreversibly, by a swift downfall engineered not only by local rivals but by supra-local enemies as well. This pattern of single-generation authoritarian rule in Cavite was overwhelmingly male-dominated, macho and gangsterish in style, and highly violent, with all 21 municipalities in the province featuring a mayor who had been murdered or accused of murder. Indeed, five mayors out of 21 were murdered during the tenure of a single provincial governor in the 1980s and early -mid 1990s. 34 In Cebu, by contrast, many municipal mayors' offices and congressional seats have been held by extended families in dynastic form, and through almost all of the twentieth century a single family enjoyed pre-eminence at the provincial level. 35 The pattern in Cebu is one of long tenure for entrenched local dynasties, with external interventions from within the province and beyond much less successful and irrevocable than in Cavite. In addition, women have played a much more prominent role in Cebu, with more paternalism and less violence than Cavite. Thus, overall, Cavite and Cebu offer a rich empirical basis for the analysis of patterns of variance in subnational authoritarianism, whether across, between, or within these two Philippine provinces, over more than 100 years.
How, then, to explain the patterns of variance observed? Close investigation and analysis of landownership, commodity chains, transportation routes, and other dimensions of the economies of Cavite and Cebu reveals striking patterns. In all cases, enduring subnational authoritarian rule in Cavite and Cebu has been preceded and/or accompanied by the accumulation of a position of monopolistic control over what can be termed the commanding heights of the local economy. Detailed and fairly reliable records of large landholdings from the mid-1950s and mid-1990s bear ample evidence of this pattern in the realm of proprietary wealth, but, these latifundia have constituted only one element in the diversified empires of these local bosses. Those who have controlled mayors' offices, congressional seats, and provincial capitols for decades at a time have also owned rice mills and sugar centrals, monopolized the copra trade and the marketing of fertilizers and pesticides, held exclusive franchises for local bus and ferry routes, cockfighting arenas, electric companies, gas stations, ice plants, and rural banks, and won mining and logging concessions and public construction contracts within and beyond their localities. Over the twentieth century in Cavite or Cebu, there was not a single case of enduring authoritarian rule that was not accompanied by this pattern of predominance in the local economy. Through elected office, moreover, such local bosses have enjoyed a position from which to regulate legal and illegal economic activities, ranging from real estate transactions to illegal lotteries ( jueteng), smuggling, and dynamite fishing, win loans from state banks and tax and regulatory breaks from state agencies, to control state budgets, lands, and other resources (e.g., irrigation), and create employment opportunities for hundreds if not thousands of their supporters in government positions within and beyond their localities. Construction and persistence of a local political machine, in other words, has been coterminous with accumulation and maintenance of a local economic empire, with the location and longevity of subnational authoritarianism closely correlated with concentration of control over the local economy in the hands of a single boss or dynasty.
What inherited structural features of local economies prefigured enduring authoritarian rule? Contrary to caricatures of Philippine politics as dominated by plantation owners, large landholdings have rarely loomed so large in municipalities or districts as to guarantee -through wealth and control over dependents -sustained holds over mayors' offices or congressional seats. Instead, if we take the two municipalities with the most impressive histories of enduring local authoritarianism in Cavite and Cebu -more than three decades for a single politician in the Cavite town of Carmona, and no less than 27 years for a single family in the Cebu municipality of Bantayan -two features of the local political economies stand out. First of all, in both towns, ascension to the mayoralty facilitated an extent of discretionary control over the local economy unmatched elsewhere in the 21 municipalities of Cavite or the 52 municipalities of Cebu. In Carmona, Cavite, for example, the municipality inherited hundreds of hectares of communal lands from the Spanish colonial era, lands whose administration was effectively controlled by the mayor. In Cebu, the northern coastal town of Bantayan was blessed with especially rich fishing grounds, and control over the mayor's office facilitated discretionary enforcement of regulations prohibiting dynamite and purse-seine trawl fishing in municipal waters.
Second, both Carmona and Bantayan stood out as 'border towns', not because of remoteness from their respective provincial capitals, but due to close economic connections to larger, wealthier 'market towns' in neighbouring provinces. Such close connections to centres of economic activity outside their provinces gave mayors of these two towns especially significant gate-keeping powers vis-à-vis economic actors with weak political roots and resources within Cavite and Cebu. Thus in Carmona, Cavite, the long-time mayor succeeded in using agrarian reform legislation in the mid-1950s to gain control over large landholdings owned by a wealthy family in an adjacent market town in the neighbouring province of Laguna. In Bantayan, Cebu, the entrenched local dynasty monopolized recruitment of seasonal wage labourers on the sugar plantations in the nearby island province of Negros Occidental, while enjoying monopoly control over crucial transportation chokepoints for the flow of people and goods in and out of the island town itself. While holding the stevedoring contract for the municipal port and operating a large-scale private port of their own, this family also forced ferries connecting Bantayan to nearby islands to anchor 100 meters from the town pier, leaving passengers and cargo at the mercy of a family-owned shuttle service charging exorbitant fees. No other municipalities in Cavite and Cebu shared this peculiar combination of mayoral control over both large-scale public resources and flows of capital, labour, and goods to/from neighbouring provinces boasted by these two towns. 36 A similar pattern was observable in cases of sustained authoritarian rule in congressional districts in the two provinces. Towns not unlike Carmona and Bantayan, for example, served as launching pads for the careers of long-time congressmen: a municipality with a large municipal-owned quarry, forest, and pastures located along the southern border of Cavite Province, and a town on the southern tip of Cebu Province which served as the hub for large-scale fishing operations. The most impressive history of enduring authoritarian rule at the congressional level -dynastic control over a north-eastern district in Cebu from 1949 through the present -began with the family patriarch's acquisition of government concessions for mining in the backhills of the district and contracts for supplying coal to a government cement plant in the 1930s and 1940s, and establishment of a private port in the main district town in subsequent decades. 37 In other municipalities lacking similar local economic conditions, no cases of enduring entrenchment by a single politician or family were observed. Thus a close comparative analysis of localities in Cavite and Cebu yields considerable evidence of the structural embeddedness of subnational authoritarianism within economic contexts that facilitate accumulation and maintenance of monopolistic forms of economic control.
Other conclusions are also worthy of note. The contrasting forms and styles of subnational authoritarianism in Cavite and Cebu, for example, correspond to the very different economic contexts of these two provinces. In the case of Cavite, the failure of local bosses to hand power over to their children in dynastic fashion and their heavy reliance on violence reflected two crucial conditions: weakness, insecurity, and instability of property rights in a province with a very problematic history of land settlement and a highly lucrative set of illegal economies. Most arable land in Cavite had been owned in the Spanish colonial era by the major Catholic religious orders, but then assumed, administered, and eventually auctioned off by the Bureau of Lands under American colonial rule in the early twentieth century. The land auctions were heavily coloured by political intervention, favouritism, and corruption, and many who won large tracts of the former friar estates assumed ownership only through loans from the state-owned Philippine National Bank, whose management was controlled by elected politicians. Large landholdings in Cavite long remained the subject of legal battles, with agrarian reform legislation in the mid-1950s and again in the late 1980s providing the backdrop for new disputes, and suburban development in the 1990s introducing complex new zoning regulations. Thus assumption and retention of large landholdings in Cavite depended on continued success in the political arena, not vice versa: long-time mayors would become the largest landowners in their municipalities, just as successive provincial bosses became the largest landowners in Cavite, only to find their properties dissipate and disappear through bank repossessions, resurfacing land reform claims, and complex real-estate transactions soon after they fell from power. 38 Second, Cavite's coastal location along the southern borders of the national capital region, Metro Manila, made the province a major site of highly lucrative illegal economic activity. 39 Up through the 1950s, Cavite was notorious for cattle rustling and highway robbery, with local politicians protecting gangs as they transported stolen cattle to the abattoirs of neighbouring Manila and extorted 'toll fees' on produce and passenger traffic through the province. In the 1960s, the coastal province became a hub for smuggling of imported 'blue-seal' cigarettes into the lucrative Manila market, and for carnapping and marijuana cultivation. Subsequent decades saw the rise of Cavite as a major centre for processing and transhipment of methamphetamines. Proximity to Metro Manila combined with a highly localized system of law enforcement in the Philippines to encourage the emergence of protected niche markets in criminality. 40 The extent of illegal economic activity in the province, the revenues reliably generated through protection and sponsorship of such criminality, and the insecurity of land titles noted above all combined to make local bosses in Cavite heavily reliant on violence, even as it greatly reduced their ability to accumulate secure forms of proprietary wealth to pass on to their children.
In Cebu, by contrast, land settlement patterns and more limited illegal economies spelled much greater security of claims to property and much less reliance on violence for accumulation and maintenance of local economic control and political power. The religious orders' landholdings were much more modest in the Spanish era as compared to Cavite, and the broad pattern of land acquisition and titling from the nineteenth century onwards made for much greater clarity and continuity in terms of ownership. Cebu, like any Philippine province, has had its fair share of criminality -smuggling, illegal lotteries, narcotics trade -but the role of Cebu City as a major hub for interisland trade in the Visayas and Mindanao, and for interisland shipping throughout the Philippine archipelago, has vastly overshadowed such illegalities. 41 With proprietary wealth so securely concentrated in family hands, it is hardly worth trying to assassinate a mayor: unlike Cavite, where a mayor's local economic empire would begin to disintegrate as he lay on his deathbed, in Cebu the mayor's wife, son, or daughter would simply step in to fill the old man's shoes. Thus, overall, variance in the nature of predominant economic activities, in the importance of the regulatory powers of local state agencies over (legal and illegal) economic activities, and, crucially, in the security of property rights have all prefigured corresponding contrasts in the style and substance, nature and form of subnational authoritarianism in Cavite and Cebu.
But if the inherited structures of the local economic context have been so determinant, what about the role of external, supra-local authorities, interventions, and economic dynamics in the making and unmaking of subnational authoritarianism in these two Philippine provinces? Here we can see that in both provinces, the 'multi-level game' of factional politics in the Philippines has worked not only to encourage competition and turnover, but also, in some circumstances, to enable the emergence, entrenchment, and endurance of subnational authoritarianism in a number of municipalities and congressional districts, and at the provincial level as well. Over the twentieth century, the embryonic political machines and economic empires of various mayors, congressmen, and governors were carefully nurtured -through facilitation of state bank loans, contracts, concessions, and monopoly franchises, assistance in winning discretionary law-enforcement, tax and regulatory breaks, as well as government appointments and promotions for their clients, relatives, and protégés -by politicians further up the proverbial food chain eager to build up reliable vote banks for future elections. Yet over the twentieth century, successive mayors, congressmen, and governors also found their local machines and empires destabilized and at times destroyed by withdrawal of external assistance and active intervention by hostile politicians. The terms of bank loans, outcomes of public tenders and court cases, implementation of laws and regulations, and personnel appointments and promotions suddenly turned decidedly less favourable, even as rival aspirants to local office began to enjoy greatly enhanced access to state largesse. Thus 'the mischief of faction' has aided in making and unmaking subnational authoritarianism in Cavite and Cebu. But, has the success of entrenched mayors, congressmen, and governors in Cavite and Cebu -and the survival of subnational authoritarianism -simply depended on their active agency, astuteness, and assiduousness in the selection, cultivation, and maintenance of linkages to superordinate sources of patronage and protection? Here the inherited structural features of the local economies of Cavite and Cebu have shaped contrasting patterns of sensitivity to fluctuating external environments for local bosses in these two provinces. In Cavite, where even the most entrenched mayors, congressmen, and governors have found themselves unable to establish a solid base in secure proprietary wealth and secure control over the commanding heights of the legal, private economy, continued dependence on state patronage and protection has made for much greater vulnerability to hostile external intervention, as seen in the much shorter tenure of even the most successful bosses in the province compared to their counterparts in Cebu. 42 In Cebu, by contrast, dominant families in the towns and districts of the province -and in Cebu City and the province as a whole -are firmly rooted in landholdings and other legitimate business interests less dependent on persistent, privileged access to state resources and regulatory powers, and thus more able to withstand periods of malicious meddling by politicians from without. Indeed, the province-wide machine and empire of the Osmeña family outlived the twentieth century, reproducing dynastic rule across three generations and surviving the lean years of Sergio Osmeña Sr's bitter rivalry with long-time Senate President (1916-1935) and Commonwealth President Manuel Quezon (1935-1941. and, more impressively, the harsh aftermath of his son Serging Osmeña's failed 1969 challenge to long-time president Ferdinand Marcos (1966. 43 Thus the inherited economic structures of Cebu rendered both external environment and individual agency less important for the survival of dynastic subnational authoritarianism in the province. The contrast with the greater impact of external intervention and the more impressive political entrepreneurialism of successive 'new men' on the more rapid -and violent -rise and fall of gangster-style, single-generation bosses in Cavite could not be more striking. Thus close study of these two Philippine provinces suggests additional elements of a framework for the comparative analysis of subnational authoritarianism.

Conclusions: economic foundations of subnational authoritarianism
How, then, can we extrapolate from research on Russia, southern Italy, the United States, Argentina, and these two Philippine provinces to explain patterns of local variance in subnational authoritarianism elsewhere around the world? The preceding discussion has suggested four hypotheses which could provide a framework for comparative analysis of local variance in subnational authoritarianism. First, subnational authoritarianism will be found only when, where, and insofar as economic autonomy of local citizens is constrained and concentration of control over the local economy is achieved and maintained by subnational authoritarian rulers. The emergence, entrenchment, and endurance of subnational authoritarianism require not only constraints on the economic autonomy of citizens in a locality (alas, an all too common condition in developing countries around the world), but also concentration of control over the commanding heights of a local economy in the hands of a single individual, family, clan, clique, or organization. Poverty and insecurity may render the population susceptible to clientelist, coercive and monetary inducements and pressures during elections and otherwise inhibit its effective capacity to exercise formal democratic rights, but such conditions do not in themselves impede competition between rival patron -client networks or other clusters of local interests. For subnational authoritarianism to crystallize, cohere, and persist, some form of control over the local economy must be achieved and sustained, so as to guarantee success in the creation and mobilization of 'locked-in electorates', to defeat -or deter -challenges from local rivals, and to exercise domination with effective constraints over 'exit' and 'voice'. Insofar as market forces and/or state structures stand in the way of accumulation and maintenance of concentrated, monopolistic or oligopolistic control of local economies, possibilities for enduring subnational authoritarianism will be effectively foreclosed.
Second, the nature, extent, and longevity of subnational authoritarian rule are shaped by the form of economic control achieved and maintained by subnational authoritarian rulers. Economic control itself varies along several axes, in terms of how complete or compromised, how centralized or fragmented, how direct or attenuated, and how reliant on private ownership or state resources and regulatory powers such control proves to be. There are classic company towns, and there are plantation belts -or factory belts -where only a primus inter pares position -and a minimalist 'winning coalition' -can ever be achieved for one large landowner or industrialist (or some other powerbroker). There are urban settings where, economic diversity aside, 'you can't beat city hall', and there are border towns with their lucrative illegal economies and 'cops and robbers' games as well. In the Philippines alone, it is possible to discern distinctive patterns associated with major cash crops, with the country's rice bowls, coconut-growing areas, sugar belts, and tobacco provinces all differing in terms of possibilities for capital accumulation and concentration of local political power. 44 Variance in the nature of the economic 'base' of subnational authoritarianism determines its 'superstructure', in ways amply illustrated by the diverging cases of gangsterism in Cavite and dynasticism in Cebu, and by scholarship on local politics across the diverse regions of southern Italy and post-Soviet Russia. 45 Thus, for example, scholars of southern Italy stress the distinctiveness of western Sicily in the late nineteenth century in terms of local patterns of cultivation, labour control, landownership, and market circulation, which created a 'brigand corridor' in which the mafia first emerged. 46 Third, possibilities for achieving and maintaining economic control over a given locality -and thus possibilities for sustained subnational authoritarianism -are shaped not only by local factor endowments and inherited local economic structures, but also by the active entrepreneurial energies of subnational authoritarian rulers and the assistance, investments, and interventions they effectively solicit from supra-local state authorities and economic actors. In other words, while there may be an extent to which we can read the political topography of subnational authoritarianism off the map of economic structures -marketing networks; land settlement patterns; crop variations; transportation chokepoints; maritime, forest, and mineral resources; nodes of state regulatory powers; concentrations of capital; forms of labour control -there is also an extent to which subnational authoritarianism itself can redraw the economic map of a locality. Here, as suggested in accounts of early post-Soviet local politics amidst transition to capitalism in 1990s Russia, and in the cases of large-scale land settlement and exploitation of forest, mineral, and maritime resources in developing countries like the Philippines, periods of so-called 'primitive accumulation' are ones in which this kind of local openness to economic transformation is most evident and abundant. 47 External intervention and individual local agency, however, may also be especially important during periods of dramatic, rapid economic and social transformation, such as the 'twilight of the machines ' (1930s -1970s) in the United States sketched by Steven Erie or the conversion of towns in developing country contexts like Cavite and Cebu into suburban factory belts, residential subdivisions, and golf courses since the 1980s. 48 During surges of economic change, in which the infusion of capital, conversion of land, and mobilization of labour reshape production relations, forms of private property, and patterns of capital accumulation, new forms of subnational authoritarianism can emerge and entrench themselves.
Fourth and finally, as the analysis above suggests, the stability and longevity of subnational authoritarian rule in the face of internal and external challenges is neither uniform nor constant, but varies over time and across space in accordance with the security of economic control -and property rights -inherited and/or achieved and maintained by subnational authoritarian rulers. Subnational authoritarianism emerges and entrenches itself through a formative process of 'primitive accumulation' -acquisition and concentration of landholdings, natural resources, and/or industrial capital; construction of monopolies over sites of production and distribution -in a given locality with acquiescence if not active assistance of supra-local authorities. But subnational authoritarianism is only viable in the long term insofar as proprietary wealth and predominance in a local economy of a subnational authoritarian ruler are solidly rooted in secure property rights in the private economy, protected from supra-local state intervention, and sustained and replenished over periods of economic transformation. As Catherine Boone has noted in West Africa, 'the greater rural elites' reliance on the market as a mechanism of surplus extraction and labor control, the greater their potential for political independence vis-à-vis the state'. 49 Otherwise, subnational authoritarianism will remain vulnerable to the vicissitudes of supra-local political competition and the vagaries of economic change. As Boone observes: 'Where rural notables' economic privileges and prerogatives depended upon the direct and continuous exercise of state prerogative, rural notables did not have much autonomy vis-à-vis the regime'. 50 The stability and sustainability of subnational authoritarian rule thus depends ultimately on the economic autonomy of subnational authoritarian rulers and their local regimes vis-à-vis supra-local authorities.
Thus the significance of supra-local linkages for subnational authoritarianism itself varies with local economic conditions. The more firmly subnational authoritarian control over the local economy is rooted in secure property rights, proprietary wealth, and the private legal realm of the market, the more successfully a subnational authoritarian ruler will be able to withstand the withdrawal of external assistance or the onslaught of external interference by supra-local state authorities, and the easier it will be to pass on a local political machine and economic empire to children and grandchildren in dynastic form. By contrast, the more dependent such economic control is on privileged access to state resources, discretionary enforcement of state regulatory powers, and illegal economic activities, the more vulnerable a subnational authoritarian ruler will be to the 'withdrawal effects' of reduced external patronage and protection and the onset of external intervention by supralocal state authorities, and the more difficult it will be to pass on a local political machine and economic empire to children and grandchildren in dynastic form. Thus the 'money-laundering' and investment strategies of subnational authoritarian rulers have extremely important political consequences for their futures and those of their families. 51 How then, to test these hypotheses and further develop this framework for comparative analysis of local variance in subnational authoritarianism? Although these hypotheses are obviously at least as crudely economistic as those advanced by scholars and other subcontracted researchers working on local politics for institutions like the World Bank, they do not lend themselves very easily to the kind of quantitative analysis so popular and increasingly prevalent in this budding realm of the production of knowledge. Even with reliable information on subnational state budgets and personnel and aggregate data on local economic conditions, the nature and extent of local economic concentration and control will remain extremely difficult to measure through statistics, especially in the realm of private -legal and illegal -economic activity, capital accumulation and proprietary wealth. It is thus unsurprising that quantitative analysis of variance in subnational authoritarianism has focused so exclusively on the importance of state resources, while systematically obscuring the significance of land and business ownership and various forms of monopoly and oligopoly in the market economy so strongly emphasized by studies based on qualitative research. Thus, as suggested by the discussion of the two Philippine provinces of Cavite and Cebu above, the testing of the above hypotheses -and the generation of new hypotheses -arguably requires an engagement with the realities of subnational authoritarianism that is more immediate, personal, and sustained than quantitative data analysis. In short, qualitative research is necessary for a fuller appreciation of the economic and political topographies of subnational authoritarianism than what can be mapped 'from above' and from without. Even in this day and age of Google Earth and GPS, Wikipedia and World Bank datasets on localities around the world, it is not simply for purposes of interpretivist, ethnographic 'thick description' that sustained, sweaty spadework in places like Omsk or Oaxaca, Tomsk or Tijuana, is ultimately necessary. If this article's arguments have any merit, then local fieldwork is also necessary for describing and explaining the variegated structures of economic, political, and social domination so easily, and at times so glibly, glossed as 'subnational authoritarianism' from great heights of physical comfort and ethical/political distance today.