Can Social Movements in Subnational Authoritarian Enclaves Facilitate Subnational Democratisation and How?

When we think about democracy, we generally think about nations and the national level. Many democracy indexes rank and measure countries on the national-level. This ‘nation fixation’ ignores within-country variations of the spread and quality of democracy. Therefore, scholars have recently started to focus on subnational democracy. They explore the spread and degree of democracy within the nation and question how pockets of authoritarianism, also called authoritarian enclaves, survive and democratize. There are currently two causal pathways for subnational authoritarian enclave democratization, namely through the national government or through opposition parties. I argue, however, that these pathways to subnational democratization are top-down in nature and that the role of civil society and social movements remains under-studied. I question when and how social movement campaigns facilitate democratization of subnational authoritarian enclaves. My case study of a social movement campaign in the province of Isabela, the Philippines allows me to trace the causal mechanisms in its subnational democratization process. Subnational authoritarian enclaves called political dynasties have existed ever since Philippine national democratization. Isabela was a subnational authoritarian enclave ruled by the Dy dynasty. They had ruled for 30 years when the non-dynastic Grace Padaca won the gubernatorial seat in 2004 and in 2007. Padaca ran on a campaign platform that consisted of social movements and civil society actors who made claims for subnational democratization. I generate and gather data by doing in-depth interviews, focus groups, archival work and by creating film material during my fieldwork in Isabela in the spring of 2019. I use Causal Process Tracing and Sequence Elaboration to unravel whether and by which mechanisms a social movement campaign can facilitate subnational democracy. I thereby aim to fill the ‘bottom-up gap’ in subnational democratization literature and simultaneously to contribute to the scholarly discussions on Philippine political dynasty defeat and on social movement impact.