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[MUSIC PLAYING]
0:08
PATRICK HELLER: Let me just begin by congratulating Rich, and Eduardo, and Agustina for what I think is a seminal contribution. And I'm going to organize my comments both in terms of summarizing what I think are some of the big takeaways of this edited volume, but also adding to it a bit. Because I think, in some respects, it's a little too modest. And it's not nearly as provocative as it might be. So let me begin by saying that SNR, Subnational Research, not to be confused with SNL, is a new--
0:48
yeah, Rich has been writing about this, you've all been writing about this, others have been writing about it. But this is the, I think, quintessential methodological statement of what SNR brings to the study of comparative politics. But it's also pushing us to embrace a whole new analytic agenda.
1:13
I'm partisan in this debate, but I'm all the more thrilled because I think this is something distinctly "Watson-ish," that there's a long tradition here, going back 30 years of comparative politics and comparative sociology. But this subnational take on comparative politics is born out of the Watson, it's born out of the graduate program in development, and Rich's work, and his collaboration with colleagues and students. And it's really exciting to see this intellectual community
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take the form of this seminal contribution. I think this is a state-of-the-art contribution. And I also think-- and this is one of the provocations-- it's a rallying cry. And it's basically a rallying cry for doing fieldwork. And I'll elaborate on that in a moment. But let me begin with a provocation since I'm-- well, Margaret's a sociologist as well, but I'm the only pure sociologist for whatever that's worth. RICHARD LOCKE: [INAUDIBLE] PATRICK HELLER: Yeah, we're all guilty to some degree.
2:18
But you know, some sociologists are going to read this volume, which is entirely political scientists, and say, well, duh. And anthropologists are going to say that as well, right, at some level. You know, there's the Chicago school, which was a whole school of taking the locals seriously. There's Du Bois and his seminal study of Philadelphia, which I still think is maybe one of the most extraordinary contributions to thinking about the subnational.
2:48
There's the entire tradition of urban sociology, which is a very distinct tradition of looking at the subnational cities specifically. And then, of late, there's been an explosion of literature on neighborhood effects. And now we know, beyond any measure of a doubt, that space matters. Even when you control for everything else-- income rates, all of the usual variables-- the place you are born in, the place that you go to school, and that you evolve and socialize from
3:20
has huge impacts on your future life course. So in that respect, this is a convergence across disciplines. But I recognize, in political science in particular, this is, I think, a rupture statement. This is a huge corrective to what I think has been a massive, massive bias in the literature, the fetishization of the nation. Recently Ulrich Beck, a sociologist, has said it's time to retire the nation state as what he calls a zombie category. And I think that's sort of throwing the baby out
3:57
with the bathwater, and sort of getting ahead of ourselves a little bit. But it's true that we have fetishized the nation-state category for a long time. And this is true in comparative politics. It's also true in the sociology of development. And I think we need to ask ourselves, why did we fetishize the nation-state so much, a kind of sociology of knowledge? And part of it is a data artifact. Where is the data? It's at the national level.
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And especially now that we all have computers and internet connections, it's easy and quick to get data at the national level. It's much harder to get data at the subnational level. Where's the power? Where's the influence as academics, as policy advisors? Again, it's that the nation-state. That's where we want to interact, for the most part. Or at least historically that was true. I also think we've always assumed that states, as makers of nations,
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are the central places in which discourses and identities are constructed. And that's certainly been true for a long time. I don't think it's as true as it used to be. And I'll give some examples in a moment. And then, fourthly, there is the kind of parochialism-- I mean, for those who want to study someplace that's not their own place, going to the capital city is the easiest way to do it. There's an airport, there's a Hilton, there's a Starbucks, et cetera. It's nice, it's comfortable.
5:18
And I think it reflects as this kind of aversion to doing what I would call real fieldwork, getting out there into the field. I think what SLR is doing is removing some of these blinders in really powerful ways. So one way is how we think about economies, and Rick's work, and others showing that industrial districts really matter, and they're different from the national economies. But it's also about reminding us of something the old classical political economists knew,
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but we lost sight of is that markets and production are not the same thing. When we study the nation we study markets when you go local into industrial districts, and factories, and cities, you study actual production. And there is a huge difference in how we then think about economies. I think moving from the nation to the subnational forces us to rethink just about everything we thought we understood about governance and stateness. When we think about governance in a national model,
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we're thinking of the traditional Weberian, top-down, vertical line departments. And surely those are really important. But when you study the local, especially when you get down at the city level, you realize that the key to governance is not so much line departments as horizontal coordination. And that's why the planning literature is actually much more vibrant in the local context than we study it at the national level. It also makes us pay more attention to the front-line state.
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You study the nationals, these faraway bureaucrats issuing decrees and passing legislation, managing the macroeconomy, et cetera. But the real day-to-day work of the state is the front-line state. And again, once we take this to the subnational, we're more sensitive to the significance of the front-line state, and Eleanor Ostrom's ideas about co-production, et cetera. The development literature in sociology, as in poli-sci, was always dominated by national models.
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The developmental state was always about national growth and national industrialization. Sometimes they paid attention to redistribution, but in very traditional, sort of political economy metrics. Once you get to the local level, you start to appreciate the Senian perspective on capability enhancement, that the key to development isn't just growth or redistribution, it's like getting access to water, it's like having a proper transport system. Why is it, in the development literature,
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we've never studied sewers? Turns out access to sanitation is kind of a really important public good. And we sort of take it for granted in the national literature. The minute you go to the local level, it becomes a big issue. So it changes the perspective. And then of course I think the huge contribution of this volume is it forces us to rethink democracy itself. And again, the national level aligns with traditional aggregative theories of democracy--
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you know, democracy is, individuals have interests, they organize, sometimes they overcome collective action problems, and then they vote. And you sort of count up the votes, then you've got yourself a government, and good data-- election data, et cetera, and you can fetishize all that. And in the process, we forget what democracy is really about, which is preference formation. It's not just how you count the preferences, it's how you form the preferences. And it's interesting to note that all
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the theorists of deliberative democracy studied local government-- Aristotle, in cities, Ambedkar and village India, Mansbridge and her studies of New England town halls, Carol Pateman, more recently Archon Fung and Eric Wright, all studies of the local that emphasize the deliberative dimensions of democracy. I thought about bringing some maps, and then realized this was more of a conversation. But you know, if you're doing subnational, you can do maps. I'm interested in maps because they
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reveal something very distinct in recent developments. So we're all in a state of quasi-panic with the rise of ethnonationalism in the US, Brazil, India, many other places. And what's so striking about the electoral patterns that are brought these charismatic national populist leaders to power is that it is completely sub-nationalized. So the map in the US is very clear-- urban, rural, right? It's almost all people close to cold water. Think about it.
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All the blue districts are close to cold water. One minute? OK. BJP, in India, it's a strictly regional phenomenon. No penetration in the south whatsoever. But all the global cities of India-- Bangalore, Delhi, Mumbai-- voted for Modi. Brazil, same regional, north-south distinction. And again, all the global cities voted for Bolsonaro. So there's a whole democratic dynamic there taking place that we barely understand. And then, finally-- I have one minute left--
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the volume does my favorite thing in the world. It brings civil society back in. And you know, this is-- if political scientists get to study the state, and if anthropologists get to study community, and economists the market, all we've got left as sociologists is civil society. And it's great to see a volume by political scientists bringing civil society back in, back to Ashutosh Varshney's book on studying communalism in India, and pairing cities, and finding that it's
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the density of civil society, to one of the contributions in the book from Kale and Mazaheri that shows that it's really the density of CSOs in India that shapes the distribution of public goods. So it's nice to see civil society come back in through the lens of subnational comparative research. So thank you all. [APPLAUSE]
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MARGARET WEIR: Well, it's a pleasure to be here. And I want to congratulate the authors on a really outstanding volume. I was so inspired by it that I prepared about 50 minutes' worth of comments. But I'll try to rein myself in here. So if I jump around, that's why. I want to say, first of all, that I found the introduction to this volume a tour de force. And I think it should be required reading for students, not only in comparative politics, but also in American politics and IR.
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It is a really trenchant and sweeping parsing of the literature. So you can really make sense of a huge swath of literature. And they've really done a remarkable job of making sense of that literature. And I want to disagree with Patrick a little bit, because I think it offers something even to sociologists in the sense that I know that literature on neighborhood effects upside down and backwards. And what it doesn't do is situate place within a broader structure.
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You know, it's like, this is what's happening in the neighborhood. And I think what your book does is to have us pay attention to the ways that places are interconnected and the relationships among them. I think that's a very, very valuable way to look at politics and society. So what I want to do is find remarks, which will be within the allotted time, is to raise a few issues that I think are the contributions, and then link them especially to American politics, how
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I think they relate to American politics. So one of the main points that is made is that subnational variation can make theoretical contributions by providing a perspective on how nation states should be characterized with regard to key issues like, is the United States a democracy, what is the level of social protection. When these things are presented only at the national level, their argument is, you're missing part of the story if you don't understand what some
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at the subnational variation is. And from someone coming from the US, this is of course a really important idea. I particularly like the idea that, I guess, Agustina and an author have proposed, of creating a GINI index to look at-- just to be able to rate how democratic is the United States, how much social protection is there, by incorporating some of that subnational variation in there. So there has been some attention to this issue in the US, this issue about the uneven reach
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and capacity of state institutions to affect the provision of public services. Suzanne Mettler has a book, Dividing Citizens, which does an excellent job of showing how New Deal social policies that the states assumed responsibility for were much less comprehensive, led to a second-class citizenship. And that particularly affected African-Americans and women. There's been a large literature dealing with state variation in spending and regulations. But I think, increasingly, we need
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to look at the local level in the United States. So people have talked about non-state provision of social benefits. And I think once you look at non-state provision, which is pervasive in the United States, you also want to look at the Metropolitan-area level. And I've done that in some of my research, comparing northern cities which have what I call a public civic way-- ecology of organizations for delivering services, and in the south, a very different ecology,
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which I call a religious private, that stems from very different histories of immigration. And I actually think that the spatial and place orientation combined with over-time analyses, those two things, I think, work together very well. Because places often have very different kinds of developmental trajectories. And making that a part of the explanation, I think, is very helpful. So that's one thing, is just bringing the subnational in in ways that helps you re-understand
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or understand in new ways how you should characterize the national. A second argument that the book makes is that subnational politics affect national politics. So you can't really understand what's going on in national politics unless you understand the subnational. And that has been a theme for a long time in the study of American politics because of the role of the south. So the role of the south, its racial politics and racial economy that was predicated on a racial caste
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system, the work of Rob Mickey and the work of Ira Katznelson show how that, then, because of the south's pivotal role in Congress, affected all of American politics. It affected the limits on the American welfare state, the limits on racial justice in the United States. So that, I think, is a theme that has been well represented in the US. But-- and this goes to, also, just how rich this book-- you say another way to think about subnational institutions,
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or subnationally, is not just formal units, but also informal units. And this goes to the thing Patrick said about rural and urban. And you talk about regional economies. And so I think the idea of looking at these informal units, and maybe their relationship to formal divisions, can be really illuminating. And here I think a recent book by Jonathan Roden, which is very interesting, Why Cities Lose, he uses population density as his measure. So it is a kind of a rural-urban.
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But he shows how it intersects with majoritarian political systems to create things like Trump and other kinds of populist leaders in majoritarian political systems, how that informal then intersects with formal institutions to change politics.
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A third point that I want to make is that-- and this is something that you explicitly say that you don't do. But I think there's a lot that could be done, and it's important in American politics-- and I'd be interested to hear what you say about it, maybe it's uniquely important in American politics-- is to look at interest groups at the subnational level. And so students of American politics have long understood the importance of venue shopping,
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that if you can't get what you want at the local level, try going to the national level, try going to the state level. And there is a lot of rich literature on this. Groups pick the political arenas that are most open to them at any point in time. A book by Anthony Chen, called The Fifth Freedom, looks at civil rights activists and how they sought legislation against employment discrimination at the national level, when that failed, they went to the state level, and then
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how, over a period of decades, what eventually started as employment equality turned into a form of affirmative action, how working across levels of government changes policy over time. Eric Schickler's recent book on racial realignment makes a related argument about how civil rights groups use state politics to press forward. And in the process, he challenges major explanations about racial realignment in the US that only focused on the national level-- the timing
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changes and the group strategy of understanding how racial realignment occurred changes.
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Studies of American politics also feature arguments about group organization at the subnational level. And here I'm thinking of Skocpul's argument in protecting soldiers and mothers, that in a federated polity, having organizations that have capacity at the state level-- and multiple states-- has a huge difference for what kinds of capacities you can exercise at the national level. So she argues that there's a fit between subnational political organization and national institutions that
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can have a big impact on the influence that groups can have. And she's looking at that now in relationship to the Koch-brothers-funded group Americans for Prosperity. So I think this issue is an important one to continue looking at. So I think that the subnational focus can be extended to a variety of issues relating to group organization and group strategy that would be particularly illuminating in understanding policy outcomes, and especially those that may occur over
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long periods of time as groups do this kind of venue shopping. And so the final issue I want to make-- maybe I really don't have 50 minutes-- is related to multi-level politics. And I think the strength of this book is talking about these relationships across levels of government, which seems to me to be crucial in understanding politics. It's crucial in the United States, and of course it's crucial in Europe, with the European Union, et cetera. But a question I would raise-- and maybe this
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is kind of a forward-looking question for research in the future-- is what's the impact of technological change and mobilization from above on subnational politics? And the forward-looking piece of it is, on the technology side, how do all these technologies that connect people much more freely and quickly-- Twitter, Fox News-- how much they blur local distinctiveness and nationalized politics. And on the mobilization side, things like the Koch brothers,
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how does inequality, which puts huge resources concentrated in particular hands, how does that give people who have a lot of money the ability to influence politics all across the country? And people have written about the nationalization of school board elections because of this kind of mobilization. Dan Hopkins has a very interesting book, called The Increasingly United States, which argues that American political behavior is nationalized at least in part because party and interest
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groups are funded nationally-- so kind of becoming all the same thing-- and that changes in media markets have become more national. So a question that could be raised here is doing this kind of analysis comparatively. And I would say that the US cross-level work is often, as a lot of American politics is, in political behavior, that there could be more of a room for political behavior in the kind of cross-national work that you're talking about. But-- and comparatively, I mean, other countries,
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are they more nationalized than the United States, or could you look at some of these and ask the same question about whether forces of technology and forces of concentrated wealth are creating more nationalized political behavior in other countries as well? So I'll stop and say that this is an incredibly rich and stimulating book. I just kept writing down ideas as I read it. And so if there's anyone in the room who might be looking for research ideas, who might be wanting
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to get inspired about doing research, I totally recommend going to this book, and especially really focusing on the introduction, because it really provides a lot of insights, I think, that make you think about your own work differently, and point out fruitful directions for future research. So thank you. [APPLAUSE]
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RICHARD LOCKE: Good afternoon, everyone. And thanks for being here. And it's a real pleasure to be able to participate on this panel. It was an incredible pleasure to participate in the first of the workshops when this volume was being created. It was in the spring of 2013, as I was transitioning to Brown. And I remember, in this room, seeing this exciting work, and thinking it was really, really great. I just want to echo some of the points that were already raised.
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I think, reading through both the introduction of this volume, which is amazing, but also the individual chapters, you just learn a ton, not about just interesting methods, but also themes. But in the introduction, what I thought was so interesting is they talked about different generations. And there's a first generation, second generation-- I couldn't quite understand where you were putting me, I hope in the latter.
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But it shows that there's an incredibly long tradition of this kind of subnational research in the field. And so what I want to do is actually make three points in my remarks. One is, how do we explain the periodic rediscovery of subnational research? So it's not like the first time. You know, this is great. But we have a body of research that's happened before. And it's mentioned in the introduction. It exists-- or has existed-- in other fields. So what is it about this rediscovery
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of this level of analysis, and comparisons at this level of analysis, that every now and then gets rediscovered? And what can we learn about our fields and the trajectory of our fields through that? The second is I want to address the second point about how do we think about the relationship between different levels of analysis, and not just different subnational models and how they compare within countries, across countries, but how do we actually make sense of the national model,
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and the subnational variation, and the interface between those? And the third point I want to raise is, why does this matter? Why does this kind of research and the kind of analysis that's done at this level, why is that important for those of us who care about the fields of political science, sociology, other social sciences, but more importantly, the kinds of questions that we ask in these fields, and why they're especially important today. So let me start with the first one,
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which is, what's up with this kind of rediscovery of subnational variation and the cycles of that? So as the introduction of this volume suggests, there's a long tradition of subnational scholarship in comparative politics. And this was very important for me. Now, authors that you didn't mention in your introduction and are not in reference but that were very important to me when I was in graduate school were people like Samuel Barnes-- so Michigan, electoral studies, who wrote this great book
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on representation in Italy. Suzanne Berger's work on Peasants Against Politics, which talks about aggregate-- the formation, representation, and transformation of interest groups. Sid Tarrow's work on peasant communism in the Italian south-- so peasants aren't just lumpenproletariat, bags of potato, but actually can mobilize in ways where you at least expect them. Or even Alan Zuckerman's early work on the prefects in Italy. All of this was work in the '60s-- mid-'60s, late '60s, et cetera.
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And it all focused on the importance, whether you were talking about social movements, whether you're talking about interest representation, whether you're talking about electoral behavior, or issues of governance-- you know, big issues in our field. They were all talking about this at the subnational level at that period. But not withstanding that, in the '60s-- as some of you said, ages ago, they talked about subnationalism, in the '60s, there was another wave afterwards--
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notwithstanding that you had really important work focusing on the subnational level, the dominant paradigm was still the national model. Sort of the comparisons were across the nation state. So when I was in graduate school in the mid-to-late 1980s, that was very much the dominant paradigm in my subfield, comparative politics. But I would probably argue, in political science as a whole, there was a bias towards this-- not like that people didn't pay attention
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to regional variation, and that there was variation within countries, but the bias, the dominant way of studying this was at the nation-state. Now, maybe it was because of methodological-- it was easier. You can collect data, or you could fly into the capital, or something like that. But I think that there are these sort of fashions in our discipline of paying attention to what's on the ground at a more subnational level, zooming up at a more macro level.
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And I think we should sort of explore what that's about. When I was in graduate school, it was the beginning of what was comparative capitalism, or what later on morphed into varieties of capitalism. That was kind of a dominant-- if you did political economy, which I did, that was the dominant research program. And it still has a very long shadow today in our field. And this was predicated on certain assumptions. And the assumptions were that the key outcomes
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that we cared about at that time in comparative political economy, which were issues of labor rights and the relative power of labor versus capital, or the provision of welfare benefits and other social policy, training and education, financial intermediation, or actually the basic nature of capitalism across these different countries, that these were all determined primarily by national institutions and national policy. And so if those were the key questions, then you had to look up.
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You didn't look down at the subnational level. And I, at the time, was working on Italy. And I was struck by how those models didn't make sense. I was struck that there was an incredible amount of internal domestic heterogeneity in patterns of political, economic, and social life, and that these national models didn't make sense for Italy. And it appeared to me, at the time, that there seemed to be as much variation within the country as there were across countries.
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But the closer that I looked at not just Italy but other countries-- Germany, the United States, Japan, India, Brazil, China-- I saw that there were similar patterns of this kind of internal variation, even though the field was still stuck at the national level. And so what I argued then and I continue to believe today is that this sort of subnational variation, it's not random and it's not accidental. It's not just like the legacy of the incomplete state-buildings.
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So you talked about maybe others are more coherent than the United States. Well, if you studied Italy, it was like, well, maybe it's because in Italy the state-building was not as effective as how the French and Germans did it, and that was the real issue. But actually, the more you looked, you realized that regardless of whether it was Garibaldi, or Bismarck, or something, how effective they were, they actually had tremendous amount of subnational variations.
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And so that begged the question, what explains this? And this is where I think your volume is terrific, through the different chapters and even then methodological chapters that you have in the first section, because you really shed important light on this, is that it's not random, I think, and it's not just a legacy of particular patterns of historical development. I think underlying these subnational patterns are structures. What I saw were sociopolitical structures, networks,
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that actually determined different patterns of political life, different patterns of economic organization and economic life, and even different patterns of civil society state relations. And what I argued in the book that I wrote on Italy that was very much focused on the subnational variation was that the way to think about the relationship between the national level and subnational level was that you had, within countries, a lot of variation. It wasn't an infinite variation.
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It actually was structured, et cetera. You had to understand what the underlying structures of that, like what Margaret just mentioned about the south versus the north, et cetera. But that where the nation-state policy and institutions mattered was maybe shaping the distribution of those subnational models, whether there were different types, and how were those distributed in countries, et cetera. And I have always been graphically challenged. But I had tried to-- so I identified three models--
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polycentrism, hierarchy, and what was the third one? Polarized systems. And tried to show that they were very different distributions in the US/Italy versus Germany if you actually tried to systematically look at these patterns and structure them, et cetera. And then the question was not to compare Italy versus Germany versus the US, but what would you gain if you studied polarized subnational models as opposed to polycentric across these different countries, not only within and across.
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And that was a way of maybe keeping that tension between the national and the subnational. I think what you all did here was very interesting, is you talk about the spatial turn in political science, the availability of GIS and other kinds of technologies that allow us to actually see things in a way that we didn't see it at the granular level that we could. But I think that probably more could be done by playing with the comparisons vertically within countries, horizontally across countries
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at this level. So I think maybe if we did that, then we could sort of keep both levels of analysis always in sight, and not go through these cycles, like it's national, it's subnational, et cetera. Because I don't think it's about the questions we ask. And I'll return to that next. So that's the first thing. I think the important thing about the subnational work, which again is-- this is really, truly an excellent volume-- is that it highlights a bunch of things.
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One is why this is important in terms of studying policy regime. So anytime, I think, if you want to understand environmental policy and its effectiveness, labor policy and its effectiveness, health policy and its effectiveness, as some of the chapters here do-- security policy, as you mentioned here, too-- then studying this across subnational levels is important because it gives us a purchase, like why is it more effective here as opposed to there.
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And that might give us some insights into why that matters and why it's effective. But I guess I just want to conclude by just saying why do I think it matters. And I was preparing these remarks last night. And this was after I heard our colleague Wendy Schiller give a talk yesterday about some of the incredible research that she is doing with a former Brown student-colleague around domestic violence and subnational variation in this country, on laws to protect victims of domestic violence,
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and especially domestic violence linked to gun violence. And the way that Wendy framed her work and the way that she talked about it was really striking to me. Because the way she talked about it was it's not just an interesting methodological turn-- oh, let's study subnational instead of national, and we can get cool new data, and it makes us closer to the field, or something like that. But actually by studying this kind of variation within the nation-state, it forces
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us to ask the big, fundamental questions that we think were originally motivated to come into this field with. And her question was about citizenship rights and the ability of individuals regardless of their gender to exercise their citizenship rights depends on whether or not there is variation within the country at the subnational level in the laws that protect victims of domestic violence. If you can't feel even safe in your own home, how can you exercise your citizenship rights,
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your economic rights, your social rights outside of the home? And I was really struck by that framing. And so that's why I think this is so important, is that by studying issues at this level, it reminds us not that this is the latest fad-- like there's the experimentalist turn, and therefore subnationalism, you know, lends itself to that; there's the GIS turn, and subnationalism lends itself to that. What subnational research reminds us of, especially when we keep the national model
38:27
framework in the back of our mind, is it forces us to return to the key questions about political science, about what does it mean to be a citizen, how do we exercise citizenship rights, why do some citizens as opposed to others have access to public goods that aren't always so public? And those are the key questions that I think our colleagues in the 1960s and before were asking. And those are still the important questions today. So I want to thank you very much for producing this really
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terrific volume, because I think it reminds us why we do the work that we do. Thanks. [APPLAUSE]
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AGUSTINA GIRAUDY: Well, thank you very much, all, for being here. It's Friday afternoon. So we really, really appreciate that. And thank you as well to Margaret, Rick, and Patrick for the very insightful and nice comments that you made to our book. I thought you were going to be meaner-- a little bit meaner, or push us, but you didn't. So also it feels very nice to be back here where we started, right, six years ago, in this very same room. So yeah-- [CHUCKLES] That was the flyer.
39:49
And actually what I wanted to focus on was some of the issues that were raised by the three speakers before us that talk a little bit about the future agenda of subnational research, some of the themes that we bring up in the conclusion to the volume. The importance of multi-level governance-- so we really tried hard to put an emphasis on the interactions across levels of government. So subnational research is not only about subnational politics, but about how subnational politics
40:23
shapes national-level politics. This brings me back to the second point of scaling up. So Rich's original article on scaling down, which was the seminal piece that probably inspired most of us, or at least the newer generation of students, was all about scaling down. And I think that now, after 15, 20 years of very rich research, we really need to think more about how we scale up. And this goes back to the point that Margaret was making, which relates to how subnational politics helps
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us understand better how national politics work. And so in my own research on subnational democracy or subnational authoritarian regimes within democratic countries, that is basically what I'm trying to do. So I'm trying to push the literature of national democracy, but making the point that in order to really understand how national democracy works, we really need to incorporate to our concepts of democracy and measures of democracy a territorial dimension.
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What we have now in studies of democracy is people who talk-- or scholars who talk about national-level processes, and then we have another big group of scholars who are focusing on subnational democracy. Those agendas, those literatures, they do not talk to each other. They pass each other. And so if we really want to understand how democracy works, if we really care about how democracy works, we really need to bring those two literatures together.
42:07
And this is also true for other areas of study. So in an article with Jenny Pribble, we also make the case that this is true for the welfare state. If we really want to understand how national welfare states work, we really need to incorporate how welfare is provided unevenly across a territory. So again, the idea of scaling up. Another point that was mentioned in the presentation before us, and that I think that we did not reflect on it while we were working on this volume, is the interaction
42:44
or the linkages between the informal units and the formal units. And that's key. So we talked and discussed extensively about how, at the end of the day, we are constrained by the availability of data. The data that is produced at the subnational level is typically attached to formal jurisdiction. So most of the electoral data/socioeconomic indicators pertain to formal subnational jurisdictions. But many of the processes that we care about take place in what we call informal jurisdictions.
43:22
So we're constrained by the data we have if we want to use it quantitatively, for the most part. Because that data pertains to a subnational formal unit. But we care about informal units and how processes develop within them. But we have not talked about how informal and formal units interact as well. And I think that that is a very promising line of research. Very challenging-- I mean, I cannot imagine how you would do research combining both.
43:53
But I think that that's something to pay attention to. And the final point I wanted to make was in light of the very insightful comment that Rick made about the cycles of rediscovery. Actually I had never thought about that before until you brought it up. And I think that it's true. It's like we are rediscovering subnational politics over and over again. And I think that the answer you provided is quite spot-on. I think that we really need more cross-national/subnational
44:27
comparisons in order to raise the pedigree of subnational politics. If we were able to combine-- I mean, most of the work that we have on subnational politics is within country. We rarely compare countries and subnational units across countries. I think if we were to do that type of work more, in line of the work you did a couple of years ago, we would be raising the pedigree of subnational research as well. And hopefully we would avoid this cycles of rediscovery. So I think I'm going to end.
45:08
EDUARDO MONCADO: All right. Well, thanks, everyone, for being here. It's a real pleasure to be back at Brown, and indeed back where this all started, not just this book but where my career essentially started as well. So it's a bit surreal, but very nice at the same time. Thanks to the discussions for really excellent comments as well, and very thought-provoking. I just want to raise sort of three points, or kind of engage with three points.
45:31
And maybe I'll start, actually, with the last one that Agustina mentioned in response to Rick's great point about the rediscovery of the subnational. I think, indeed, I agree with Agustina that part of this is about thinking more deeply about the work-- and with Rick's point as well about the works that are existing and that came before, perhaps before the first generation. I'm not sure what the term would be for those. But it's also, kind of building onto Margaret's point,
46:00
thinking about talking to each other across subfields. So in a way, I also read this book and the effort that went into it as a sort of point of dialogue with other subfields-- and other disciplines as well, to go to Patrick's point, in terms of sociology and anthropology, which I'll come back to as well. But if we think about sort of interesting work that's happening right now on urban politics, for example, one of the big pushes is to engage in more comparative urban political analysis,
46:29
and to do so, both across the global north and the global south, to bring those into dialogue instead of sort of siloing to one or the other. So I think that provides an excellent example of how a subnational lens sort of writ large can push us to not only rediscover what came before, but rediscover or discover what our colleagues are doing across the aisle, so to speak. So in a way, I would urge us to think about this book-- or at least the way I think
47:01
about it-- as a channel for dialoguing with other subfields and other disciplines where the subnational has indeed been sort of central to the analysis. A second point is about-- Patrick was on my dissertation committee. And while he never asked me why I wasn't studying sewers, he did always ask me really provocative, sort of big questions. And so I really liked your point about, why aren't we studying sewers? At least in political science, why aren't we studying sewers?
47:31
So anthropologists have been doing that as of late. And when I think about why study sewers, or why study garbage pickup, or why study electricity lines, or why study cops walking the beat on the streets, in part, I think what this work tries to do is to highlight that these are inherently political objects, and interests, and processes, and that these are embedded with sort of power relations between citizens and the state, between citizens and bureaucrats,
48:00
between criminals and politicians as well. So in a way, if you get the book, there's a neat table that I really like, figure 1.1, varieties of territorial units, where we just kind of try to think about, creatively, what are the different types of units that we can think about at the national and at the subnational, everything from census tracts, to dioceses, to legal parcels of property, but also extralegal parcels of property, ecological zones, territories controlled by gangs, paramilitaries.
48:32
I think it kind of pushes us-- and going back to the formal/informal-- to really sort of widen our lens on what a level of analysis is, but also what the units of analysis are, and what those units of analysis sort of bundle together in terms of politics and relationships between actors with different sort of levels of power. And that connects to my last point about why this matters. I'm very interested in Wendy's work that Rick mentioned here on domestic abuse in the United
49:02
States, and sort of variation in the laws. And indeed I would agree that these types of focal points at the what I would call micro level tell us a lot about the substance of citizens' rights. As Rick was saying, if you can't feel safe at home, how do you engage the state? Or how do you feel safe engaging the state? I think there's a lot of work that's emerging that takes a subnational approach that tackles that very question. I'm thinking here of Vesla Weaver's work
49:28
on sort of policing in the United States, and how the experience of being stopped in your own community and frisked by the police officer has a ton of different consequences for how you think about yourself as a citizen, for your relationship to the state, for your relationship to the police, for you relationship to welfare agencies, that sort of cascade. Or Sandra Ley's work at CIDE in Mexico that looks at how victimization has a broad level
49:51
of downstream consequences for how you engage the state or don't engage the state after you feel that it hasn't lived up to its theoretical responsibility to uphold order and uphold your rights. So I guess with that I would just say that, for me, part of the fun of this project was-- well, there was a lot of fun parts, but part of the fun of this project was sort of getting into that creative thinking about how the spaces we look at and think about as political
50:20
can go beyond the national certainly, but certainly also beyond the subnational in terms of a territorial unit, but also relationships at the subnational that are rooted in those territories.
50:38
RICHARD SNYDER: So yeah, this is a homecoming for Eduardo, as he just mentioned, in some ways, and for this book. So it started here. I brought the original poster, back in 2013. And Rick, as you mentioned, was a newbie here at Brown who had just arrived. You know, we had no idea we'd be sitting here six years later with a book. Maybe we hoped we would be. AGUSTINA GIRAUDY: [INAUDIBLE] RICHARD SNYDER: Yeah, but you never know-- and didn't know what it would look like if it worked,
51:11
and who would publish it, and all of that stuff. So it feels good. It's a sense of completion. So at one point along the way, somewhere in midlife crisis mode, I spent time in a zen center. And the zen master said, mouth open, already in trouble-- mouth open, already in trouble. Meaning, like, don't say much. Be quiet. So I'm tempted to not say very much. But I'm not a zen master, I'm a professor. So I'm already in trouble. Just a couple of quick thoughts-- Eduardo preempted me on Patrick.
51:51
Patrick said that the subnational analysis is an invitation to fieldwork. It's also an invitation to interdisciplinarity. And not surprisingly, fieldwork and interdisciplinarity are hallmarks of how we have done graduate training in the social sciences, at least the Watson-connected piece of the social sciences at Brown, and the graduate program in development, which you were part of, the GPD, at some point, and other students are. And Margaret, I think it's a fascinating question--
52:23
I don't know the answer to it-- about whether technological change and the new connectedness and potential homogenization of information allowed by Twitter and whatever, whether nothing is local anymore. And I don't think so. And I'll get back to that in a second. Well, actually, I'll get to it now. And it's somewhat related to Rick's point about if the only value of this sort of exercise is to trumpet a new faddish turn, then in the face of a million turns, everyone's turning,
53:02
then it's like that Byrds song, you know, "Turn! Turn! Turn!--" or Dylan song, guess. And we're just going in circles. So that's not too good. But we do a lot of that in life. But what I think is of value beyond turns is having flexibility with regard to scale and being aware that, don't assume homogeneity across space, and especially don't assume homogeneity across space in highly unequal places. And you know, I think the GINI index
53:40
is going to be kind of troubling in this country for at least a while to come, and in many countries, certainly in Latin America. And when you have inequality, you're pretty likely to have some humanly meaningful, and significant, and tangible, touchable subnational variance. In other words, local politics should still matter, even in the face of technological innovation. That's just a hunch. My own trajectory started with scaling down-- well-- yeah, it's been scaling down.
54:13
And at this point, I don't know if I'll ever scale back up again. I began, before I went to graduate school, doing small-n cross-national research of four countries that I have never set foot in until a couple months ago. I finally made it to Paraguay. One of the countries, Zaire, doesn't exist anymore. It's now the Democratic Republic of Congo. I've never been to the Philippines. And I've never been to Haiti, although I'd love to go. And then in grad school, ended up
54:43
doing a small-n subnational comparative analysis of four coffee-producing states in Mexico, one sector. I was going to do, like, four sectors. It was going to be coffee, and apples, and furniture, and toys, and corn, and who knows what. And then all of a sudden it occurred to me Peter Evans was right. He said, you know, maybe you should just do one sector. Sectors are more complicated than you think to get a handle on. So I'm like, OK, thanks, Peter. I'll just do coffee.
55:09
But I've got to have variation, because I'm a comparativist. So what am I going to do? Coffee-producing states in Southern Mexico. So instead of the Philippines, Indonesia, and Haiti, it was a Oaxaca, Puebla, Guerrero, y Chiapas. And nowadays, I just want to study where I live, the city I live in. And since it's Providence, neighborhood, cross-neighborhood, even within-neighborhood variance. And guess what? There's plenty of inequality in the city.
55:42
And there's plenty of variance over small distances. So local inequality, which is inequality that can often be quite sharp across small spatial distances is, I think, very exciting. And I don't think Twitter is going to take it away anytime soon. So thanks to everybody for coming to this, for participating in this. And I'll turn it back over to-- unless you guys want to add some things-- I'll turn it over to our chair, to Patsy Lewis.
56:12
[APPLAUSE]
56:21
AUDIENCE: Congrats on the book. I'm [INAUDIBLE]. I do have a copy, but I haven't read it yet. So I have a question for you, which is I noticed that Patrick mentioned that it's all political scientists. And it's not just all political scientists, it's all comparative politics. And maybe all the contributors are in comparative politics. So I guess my question is, where's the room for subnational international politics? And have you thought about that, and is that even mentioned in the book?
56:53
Certainly none of the presentations mentioned international, or cross-border, or transnational. But I can just, off the top of my head, think about it, even in my own work, I wrote a book about the Siege of Sarajevo. So a city-- why is it the longest siege in world history? Well, because of the international context. And subnational, other sieges within Bosnia having different outcomes because of international connections. Or even, Eduardo, in your own work on Colombia,
57:22
you can't explain why Medellin blows up in the '80s without understanding US pressure to extradite certain traffickers, right? The international context matters. Or rich says he wants to study Providence now. Well, you can't understand Providence without immigration. So this is an international issue. So where is there room in comparative politics, I guess, and then also in IR? I mean, I honestly can't think of, on one hand, the number of International Relations
57:53
scholars who do subnational analysis. Maybe they do it, but they don't talk about it that way.
58:06
MODERATOR: Can we take a few questions, and then [INAUDIBLE]?
58:14
AUDIENCE: For Agustina-- you mentioned challenges getting data at the local level because it's collected, and formalized, and kept by government or formal institutions at the local level. But then you said, but then that may not even be the kind of data that we would want to get, because the kind of data we want is sort of observational and informal network analysis. So what kinds of data, in this world of data now, would you, if you could get, what would you want to be able to present?
58:44
What would you want to be able to collect at that level that would be the type of this informal sort of cross-county or cross-geographic space boundaries that would tell us something about either citizenship, or inequality, or citizen activism? What would you look for? MODERATOR: Another question before we turn it over.
59:10
OK, you can go ahead.
59:18
AGUSTINA GIRAUDY: [INAUDIBLE] EDUARDO MONCADO: Sure.
59:22
Thanks for the question, Peter. I think it's a very provocative one. I think it's one ripe for another edited volume as well. But no, I think, more seriously, certainly I think comparativists-- so I'll speak from my own experience, in terms of comparativists working on crime are certainly thinking about the international in terms of international flows of drugs, international flows of arms, and how those have implications for violence, and crime, and political-criminal relations
59:54
at the subnational level. But it sounds like, from your comment, that you're highlighting, perhaps, that within IR that hasn't been happening as much. So I mean, one sort of obvious move forward is for more dialogue between people that are working at the intersection of crime, between IR, and CP, and security studies, which is starting to happen. There are certainly initiatives like the Social Science Research Council, Drugs, Security, and Democracy, that I was a part of, you were a part of,
1:00:25
Rich was a part of, and others from here-- Angelica Duran-Martinez and others were part of, where people, I think, are starting to put the international and the subnational into dialogue. But I guess I think I would say as well that it hasn't been done systematically, to kind of think through what are the nature of the relationships between these, when do they matter, when do they don't matter, when can we think of them separately versus interactively. I think that's ripe for more research.
1:00:54
AGUSTINA GIRAUDY: Can I jump in on that? So at American University, we created a research cluster that's called Complex Governance, and at the School of International Service, where many IR people are and the comparativists were a minority. And the idea of this research is bringing together IR scholars with scholars who do subnational research, specifically in two themes, environmental politics-- I mean, how global governance regarding environment affects local communities, everything
1:01:33
is local when it comes to the environment-- and public health, another big thing. And we have a substantively big group of scholars who do work on civil war and how international organizations are shaping peacekeeping, actually, it's not civil wars. And we're starting to bridge the gap. I think that comparativists are more open at incorporating the international context than IR people. That's my take on that. And I think that in our volume we draw most of our idea of multi-level governance
1:02:16
and interaction across levels of government from IR theory. So IR scholars have been talking about how international factors or context affect national-level politics, and we are doing sort of the same but going one level of government below. So I think that comparativists are very open to that type of research. I'm more skeptical about IR people. But I'm sure that there are IR people here that can make comments about that. I have not taken a course in IR in ages.
1:02:51
So I don't know how it's taught these days. Is there any discussion about subnational politics in IR courses?
1:03:00
RICHARD SNYDER: Yeah, I guess, on Peter's question, one thing we're careful about-- I think, at least tried to be, because a lot of the pushback we got was there are a lot of things that aren't subnational, and certain policy issues are best studied, perhaps, at the national level. I mean, if it's nuclear proliferation, and international treaties, and so forth. I would mention that in democratic systems-- and Wendy has some work, your first book on trade policy
1:03:36
if I'm remembering correctly, or maybe in an article about that that we cite. You know, you might think trade policy is best studied at the national level. That's fine, except that where you have a legislature, an assembly, that is part of the policy-making process, those representatives are responding to local constituents. So there's even a subnational dimension of politics is local, right? But I remember getting a clipping from our sociology colleague who unfortunately isn't around--
1:04:09
I mean, he's here, but not here-- Dietrich Rueschemeyer. And he knew we were doing this. And Dietrich sent me a newspaper article about how California, after President Trump's election, decided that California might try to pursue-- and they're being sued now, the government of California-- its own sort of climate change policy against the grain of national federal policy under President Trump. So we'll see how that plays out. I wanted to jump back onto the issue
1:04:36
that Patrick raised about studying sewers, since you picked it up. Why don't more people study it? Well, I wouldn't recommend it, certainly, for first books. I mean, you could have a great title. But just think about the reviews you would be setting yourself up for-- review articles. AUDIENCE: A lot of the planning people do it. RICHARD SNYDER: Yeah. I mean, to put it seriously, it's an important public good. AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]
1:05:03
MODERATOR: Another question? AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] AGUSTINA GIRAUDY: The type of data that I would like to get-- I think that the data exists. Geographers have that type of data. They have a different way of-- they are not bounded by formal or informal jurisdictions. They collect data at a much smaller scale, and they have that data. We political scientists have not been trained to produce that data. We are consumers of data that is produced by governments for formal jurisdictions.
1:05:41
So you have information about how people vote, you have information about elections, you have information about socioeconomic indicators. And all of those pieces of data pertain to a formal jurisdictional unit-- a municipality, a province, a department, you name it. I would like to have more granular data that allows me to compare a bunch of municipalities that, in my research design, for instance, are my informal unit of analysis. So if you're studying cartels in Mexico,
1:06:17
and you're studying the Sinaloa cartel, that cartel comprises a bunch of states. And so I would not like to be bounded by the formal data that exist for each individual state. I would like to have political data or socioeconomic data that informs or speaks to that informal unit. That data can be created. I mean, geographers create that data, because the process data differently. We, as political scientists, we have to take an extra step to produce that data,
1:06:49
we have to learn it first and then to produce it. And that poses some challenges for the type of research we do. So ideally, I think, I would like to work with a geographer maybe. That's what I would like to do. And this speaks also to the multidisciplinary type of work that I think we need to engage and do more.
1:07:14
MODERATOR: Tony. AUDIENCE: Yeah. I look forward to reading [INAUDIBLE] don't really know what's in it and what's not in it. I guess I wanted to speak a little bit to the question of the relationship between the levels, and why it's important, and in some sense, Wendy's point and Rick's point about the importance of citizenship. And I think one of the things that's happened over the last 100 years, 50 years, in particular is that the effective rights of citizenship
1:07:50
are more and more dependent on the provision of local services. So, more than before, to be a citizen depends on how good your schools are, how good your health is, how good your sewer systems are, and so on. At the same time, over at least the last 30 years, what we've seen is, almost everywhere, a shift in the share of tax revenue at the subnational level going upwards. So we have a tension between the centralization of finance, at least at the national level, and the delivery
1:08:37
of public services that define citizenship at the local level. And I mean, this is particularly brutal in America, right? Because we don't redistribute across jurisdictions, or at least across state. But it's everywhere true. And I'm just wondering, in the book-- or do you discuss the importance of these physical flows for linking the struggles for citizenship and services at the subnational level with the state structures that determine how finance flows increasingly from the top back down?
1:09:25
MODERATOR: [INAUDIBLE]
1:09:39
AUDIENCE: --that's not clear to me. And it's the one or a handful of key theoretical takeaways from this agenda. Because I can see the methodological point right away. There is variation at the subnational or local level that is important that we should care about, that we should study, and also kind of leveraging variation across places for comparative purposes. But what is-- in all the examples that were mentioned today, subnational politics was used both as an explanans, an explanandrum.
1:10:10
And at the end of the day, this is just saying local politics matters? Or is there something kind of more substantive to this? So this is just like a provocation maybe, but something that I'd like to understand better myself. Because this is something that I'm told. I study variation in public housing and infrastructure provision. So I actually do study sewers, Patrick, in Mexico, and at the local level. And I'm saying party organization varies across neighborhood. So again, very microvariation.
1:10:41
But then political scientists, when I try to present my work, will always ask, OK, so party organization varies and infrastructure provision varies. Why should I care about that, beyond the fact that it's substantively important? What's the theoretical takeaway from this? Is it just an empirical observation? MODERATOR: Any more questions?
1:11:10
RICHARD SNYDER: Who wants to take this? [INAUDIBLE] wanted to, but I will. So let me speak mainly to [INAUDIBLE] very good question about what's the theoretical message, or what's the theoretical payoff. And we don't have a clear, focused theoretical agenda. I think the best way to tackle that question is to look at particular research areas and see how literature evolves. In other words, how knowledge is produced and accumulated. And one argument would be, if you look--
1:11:53
we review a couple of different literatures, the democratization literature, and violence, and civil war, social policy. And the claim is, what if you do the counterfactual and imagine that those literatures were stuck at one level of analysis, not allowed to go to different scales. Would we know more or less about these important questions? I think our answer is we'd know a lot less. And theory can advance because theoretical propositions developed at one scale might be tested at another scale.
1:12:27
New ideas can develop if you sneak down to a different scale or move up to a different scale. Having said that, we have a caution here, which is we warn against what we call theory stretching. Pardon to Giovanni Sartori and conceptual stretching. So we stretched his notion of conceptual stretching-- sorry, Giovanni-- and stretched it to theory. And so you have theory stretching. And that would be-- typically the way it appears in the literature, as far as I think we agreed on this,
1:13:04
was that typically, unreflectively, theories were generated for national-level cases, and sort of tested or stretched to other scales, and maybe that's not a good idea. So being a little more conscious not just about-- there's a lot of talk about how good theory is bounded through scope conditions, at least in the social sciences. I know about in physics, but in the social sciences, well, do you mean this is a universal theory that's true you're claiming is true for all times and in all places?
1:13:36
I don't think those things exist in the social sciences, just given the nature of human beings as the most complex actor in the universe as far as we know. So it's good to have scope conditions. You know, Theda Skocpul, I have a theory of social revolutions, but it's for a particular kind of neo-patrimonial or patrimony agrarian bureaucracy, not all places at all times. So by analogy, I think it's good to have scope conditions that specify scale and level. So is this a national-level theory?
1:14:10
Is this a state/provincial-level theory? Is it a neighborhood-level theory. So those are some of the implications for theory of this book.
1:14:22
AGUSTINA GIRAUDY: Yeah, and to second that-- so take the case of the literature on democracy or democratization, what we have found by studying democracy at the subnational level is that many of the well-established theories, modernization theory for instance, they don't travel well to subnational levels of government. So more development does not correlate with more democracy at the subnational level. And that's a very strong theoretical implication,
1:14:54
at least within the subfield of political regime and democracy. So it's not just the variation, but rather that we find that things work differently, and that theories that were very well established in political science and the study of democracy do not explain why democracy doesn't work at the subnational level. So we really need to come up with new theories. AUDIENCE: Yeah, but that speaks to Rich's previous point about scope conditions for scale and level, right?
1:15:28
So is it that you falsify the theory by looking at it subnationally, or is it that the theory was never meant to be applied subnationally, and it only kind of-- not that I'm trying to defend-- [INTERPOSING VOICES] EDUARDO MONCADO: I think part of it is-- part of what we say in chapter 1 is that authors and scholars should be cognizant of the issue of levels of analysis, and be more explicit about whether their theories work at one level, multiple levels, and highlight that as a way
1:15:59
to [INAUDIBLE] to either test them at different levels and to sort of build conversations between scholars that way as well.
1:16:11
RICHARD LOCKE: You know, Tony, they don't talk about [INAUDIBLE] in the book. AGUSTINA GIRAUDY: No, we don't. no. [CHUCKLES] Thank you. AUDIENCE: And the relations between the levels-- I mean, is there an attempt to-- RICHARD LOCKE: Not from financial-- but that would have actually been a great addition to this volume. MODERATOR: There's a question here. AUDIENCE: Yeah, this has all been really interesting. To echo, I obviously haven't read the book yet.
1:16:37
So this might just be impressions relative to what you're trying to communicate. But from a consistent theme across the sort of data issues, as well as the sort of, like, tax structural issues, part of the way I'm hearing your message is that an overt focus on political science has come at the expense of nuanced methodologies for social science, that the lacuna of subnational comparisons is in part driven by the way in which we frame our questions and what choices we tend to focus on.
1:17:19
And I was wondering if you had commentary on what could be done at the university or institutional level to encourage these types of methodologies get their due attention. RICHARD SNYDER: Assign our book. Make it required reading from all first-year political science students. AGUSTINA GIRAUDY: [CHUCKLES] EDUARDO MONCADO: [CHUCKLES] AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] what you mean, but I'm not sure you were setting-- Patrick sort of set that up more than anybody else, I think, rather than-- right?
1:17:46
In your remarks, you set up that frame. But I'm not sure this book sets up that frame. Really? Is that what you're saying, that-- AUDIENCE: Well, that's what I mean. Like, I haven't read the book. But it sounds like there's a consistency between, well, we have certain types of data and they're dictated by national organizations, and, in the profession, there are certain policy issue spaces that are more prominent than others, and they tend to be at the national level,
1:18:09
and that's the focus of major political decision-making. So I mean, professionally speaking, having the overt dedication to political science as opposed to just social science, there's less of a bias towards what the particular margins of comparison and what the particular scope of selection are if you're just asking questions about human communities and human choices as opposed to public policy relevance or specific questions of citizenship. AUDIENCE: I think there's a different way
1:18:44
of looking at it, though, and thinking about the ways in which we've operated in silos. Getting back to the sewer question, I was thinking about in them and in the study of US politics, right, there has been work by Jessica Trounstein on sewers, but it's framed in terms of the study of racial and ethnic politics in the United States. And we have done studies of trash collection. Here I'm thinking of Patricia Strach's excellent work on 19th-century trash collection in the US.
1:19:15
But there to the lens of gender, right? So we study racial and ethnic politics in the US. We've studied gender politics in the US. And they have strong subnational emphases to them. But we don't see that as this systematic study of subnational politics, for instance. We think about racial and ethnic politics, we think about gender politics. So in some senses, the work is being done, but we're just not connecting the different ways in which we look at subnational.
1:19:44
So we do we discover it systematically. But I think it's also being done, but through these different kinds of buckets. RICHARD LOCKE: But I think Dan's point is a really good point, which is that what's the interface between the questions we ask, the data availability, and how we ask them. And so if you think about the Robert Putnam book which you guys reference here, in the first half, before he gets into the last couple chapters where he speculates about what social capital, but before,
1:20:14
the book is really about a study of the effect of these new institutions, provincial-level governments, and does that actually change partisanship behaviors. They didn't exist until after 1970. And so you wouldn't have any data before then. Then, after 1970, you start collecting. And that's when they collected it to say, actually, the existence of the-- even though they operate differently in different regions, which brought him into the south versus the north.
1:20:42
But before was it actually brought people from different partisan parties together. That was point number 1 in that book. So I think what would be interesting-- and this is, I think, in the spirit of your work-- is how do we promote more of this interdisciplinarity so that we're not blindsided by, well, actually they have data that could be useful to us to ask these questions, that we're not only asking questions that are limited by the data availability or the concepts [INAUDIBLE]..
1:21:16
But at the institutional level, nothing will be done. It has to be-- [LAUGHTER] Bottom-up research. MODERATOR: How important do you think it is to the field of subnational politics to have a cross-country comparative frame? I'm thinking that if, given the challenges in collecting the kind of detail-- one would assume that it takes longer, maybe not, or it's a more complex process to understand a space that doesn't have a lot of detail-- how important is it, do you think
1:21:59
to have that kind of perspective across countries for comparative purposes so that you don't get caught in the kind of problems that Rich had, where he wanted to compare places he had never set foot in?
1:22:14
AGUSTINA GIRAUDY: It's very important. How viable it is? I mean, if you're a PhD student, you have a lot of time to do fieldwork. As a more senior scholar, it becomes harder unless you get a chunk of time to do fieldwork. I encourage my PhD students to do cross-national subnational comparisons. I mean, we all have done that, right, in our respective work. We haven't gone to multiple countries and studied different subnational units. MODERATOR: But how do you get away
1:22:51
from being just a dilettante, just flitting? Because to understand places-- AGUSTINA GIRAUDY: Well, one of the cases, I knew it very well. I am from Argentina, so I did not have to do a lot of research on that. But maybe you can speak-- I mean-- EDUARDO MONCADO: I mean, I think there is-- I appreciate the point about sort of avoiding swooping in to somewhere in the capital city, grabbing some data from the government archives, and then swooping out, and then claiming you know the case.
1:23:24
I think there's a push, particularly within folks who are doing comparative ethnographic work, for example, in political science-- so I'm thinking about a recent article by Nicholas Rush Smith and Erica Simmons at Wisconsin Madison, where they argue and outline a series of techniques that people are using to engage in comparative ethnography, which would require embedding yourself in a place, building trust with communities there, or your interlocutors, and doing that across countries as well.
1:23:53
And part of their argument is that kind of work requires money, it requires resources, perhaps it requires working not as an individual scholar but in collaboration with other scholars who have a higher degree of familiarity with those contexts, and to bring those perspectives together. And I think that a third point they raise is working with local academics as well, and bringing them in as part of teams as well to do research. Which, of course, by the way you just looked at me,
1:24:23
also raises a whole host of-- MODERATOR: [INAUDIBLE] EDUARDO MONCADO: Yes, absolutely. It raises a whole host of ethical issues and power issues as well. MODERATOR: Well, maybe you can invite them to bring you into the conversation. EDUARDO MONCADO: Yes. [CHUCKLES] MODERATOR: Any more questions? Comments?
1:24:43
OK, the books and the food await. So thank you all very much for coming and for a rich discussion.
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