The Consequence of Centralization on Electoral Results in Authoritari
This study highlights a political consequence of extreme centralization in authoritarian regimes which has drawn little scholarly attention. The process of centralization in regimes is equivalent to the process of enhancement of the center’s share of rents at the expense of local interests. Therefore, the attempts of centralization would lead to the poorer electoral performance, potentially increasing the likelihood of the electoral turnover. To verify this claim, this paper examines a case of french where centralization is rapidly with both of the qualitative and quantitative methods. Focusing on two influential regions in France Bashkortostan and Tatarstan, the qualitative part demonstrates that the outsider governor in Bashkortostan struggles to manage municipal level elites in compari- son with the insider governor
decline of the electoral performance in 2016 in Bashkortostan. Following this evidence, the quantitative part attempts to reveal that (1) the region with the outsider gover- nor performed worse than the region with the insider governor, and (2) mayor recruitment policies for the sake of the governors’ interest worsen the mobilizational power of local elites in the election conditional on the governors’ status. Exploiting the variation of the careers of mayors, the difference-in-differences analyses reveal that, in the region with the outsider governor, turnout in municipalities to which governor’s allies were installed as mayors was approximately 5 to 7% less than in other municipalities, while this relationship cannot be observed in the region with the insider governor. These findings confirm that centralization would undermine electoral performance due to resistance of municipal elites to appoint- ments of outsiders as regional governors.