Federalism and the Territorial Construction of Strategic Narratives: The Case of Voter Fraud Politics in Texas

This paper analyses how federalism shapes the construction, circulation, and institutional consequences of strategic narratives, using Texas as a case study of how subnational politics can challenge democratic resilience within a multilevel system. While the United States is a consolidated democracy, its federal architecture grants state governments extensive authority over elections. This creates differentiated territorial arenas where political actors can construct narratives that justify distinctive—and sometimes illiberal—governance trajectories. In Texas, state-level elites have, since the early 2000s - but especially after 2016 - mobilized the narrative of widespread “voter fraud” to frame elections as sites of vulnerability and to cast certain local jurisdictions—particularly urban, diverse counties—as spaces of heightened risk. This narrative operates not merely as partisan rhetoric but as a technology of rule that legitimizes restrictive electoral legislation, administrative centralization, and increased state intervention in local electoral administration. Through these discursive constructions, federalism becomes the medium through which political actors reconfigure the territorial balance of power. Drawing on discourse analysis, legislative and administrative datasets, and spatialized patterns of institutional change, the paper shows how strategic narratives produce territorialized pathways of democratic stress. With a weakened federal supervision of elections after a 2013 ruling by the Supreme Court, federalism currently enables state governments to redefine electoral norms within their borders while preserving the outward appearance of procedural regularity. This dynamic illustrates a broader comparative tension: federal structures can foster democratic innovation, yet they can also be instrumentalized to entrench partisan control and weaken local democratic accountability. The Texas case demonstrates how challenges to democratic resilience may emerge endogenously from within multilevel systems—not solely through overt institutional breakdowns, but through the territorial and strategic deployment of narratives that reshape perceptions of legitimacy, risk, and authority. Based on interviews conducted during a fieldwork in Texas and on primary data from parliamentary debates and electoral campaigns, analysis invites broader comparative reflection on the interplay between federalism, strategic domestic narratives, and democratic robustness.