Are Ethnically Heterogeneous Cities More Democratic? Explaining the Sub-national Component of Consociationalism in Post-Conflict Countries.

In this project I study, measure, and explain patterns of subnational democracy worldwide and in developing and post-conflict countries with emphasis on the critical case of Bosnia and Herzegovina. This dissertation extends previous research on post-conflict democratization by 1) re-focusing the unit of analyses towards the subnational and individual levels; 2) by adapting cross nationally comparable measures of electoral local democracy; 3) by bridging the subnational regimes literature with consociationalism, representation, and political psychology; and 4) by including methodologies that take into account the geographic distribution of demographic factors and their effects on politically relevant outcomes. The main arguments are that subnational authoritarianism is more likely to occur in middle-range democratic countries. That when comparing cross-nationally, ethnic diversity seems to foster the unevenness of subnational democracy. But the internal geographic distribution of demographic factors matter, which can only be studied through the subnational comparative approach. I contend that subnational authoritarianism spillovers from ethnically homogeneous to heterogeneous municipalities when the latter are surrounded by the former, and the effect of ethnic diversity on democracy varies from negative to positive. Finally, I propose a novel explanation for individual level vote choice for multiethnic parties that is caused by possessing higher levels of interethnic tolerance, as well as ethnic diversity and economic development at the local level. This dissertation shows that the presence of subnational authoritarianism is more related to an incomplete transition to democracy than a regime juxtaposition. I found that the relation between unevenness of local democracy and national democracy follows an inverted U-shaped form. Both extremes of the democracy continuum present even distributions of subnational democracy (authoritarianism). Also, due to the varying effects of ethnic diversity at the local level, it stresses the relevance of apolitical civil society organization. Give the current and expected social, demographic, and environmental changes worldwide, in which cities will become more diverse, it is urgent to prepare the local governments to promote effective integration and mutual understanding under democratic settings. I use a variety of methodological tools that match theories with data and unit of analyses, such as first difference regressions, Geographic Information Systems tools, and multilevel logit models, the last two being novel in comparative

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctor of Philosophy

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Political Science

Grantor

University of Houston

Year dc:date.issued

2016

Author dc:creator

• Nunez Donoso, Rodrigo F.

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Alemán, Eduardo
• Bagashka, Tanya G.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Granato, Jim
• Whitt, Sam

• Subnational Democracy
• Post-conflict Democratization

Statement dc:rights

• The author of this work is the copyright owner. UH Libraries and the Texas Digital Library have their permission to store and provide access to this work. Further transmission, reproduction, or presentation of this work is prohibited except with permission of the author(s).

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10657/7911

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:uh-ir.tdl.org:10657/7911