Life in the Political Machine: Dominant-Party Enclaves and the Citizens They Produce

Against the backdrop of a world characterized by highly uneven democracies, in which subnational dominant-party enclaves persist within nationally democratic regimes, this book explores the ways in which these enclaves shape the political attitudes and behaviors of citizens who reside in them. Through analysis of a decade’s worth of survey data across the 55 provinces and states of Argentina and Mexico, this study finds a distinct subnational political culture among individuals nested in dominant-party enclaves. This culture is characterized by heightened exposure to corruption and vote buying, low levels of support for democratic principles, and patterns of political behavior that reflect the governing characteristics of the political machines that citizens must confront on a daily basis. In contrast, among those individuals living in subnational political systems that have successfully shut down the machine, the work finds a political culture more akin to that found in established democracies. As such, this book provides extensive support for the need to more fully incorporate subnational political dynamics into accounts of the drivers behind citizens’ political attitudes and behaviors, in an era in which democracies across the world appear increasingly at risk.