Roots and Routes of Resistance: Local Oppositions and the Spatial Limits of Authoritarian Control

Opposition actors in electoral authoritarian regimes face persistent and high-stakes strategic dilemmas. These regimes hold regular elections to maintain a democratic facade, while skewing the playing field through their partisan control of public resources, the bureaucracy, the courts and the national media. Electoral autocrats seek to entrench their rule at the subnational level by distributing patronage and co-opting locally prominent elites to secure mass support. Yet, their ability to consolidate control over local governments varies widely across time and among cases. Local governments are emerging as critical, but understudied, spatial sites of opposition strength and authoritarian vulnerability. While existing studies highlight the immediate governance outcomes of opposition-led local offices, they say little about where local resistance emerges, how it spreads and why it persists in some areas but not others. This paper develops a theory of local resistance and the spatial limits of authoritarian control. Challenging the assumption that authoritarian consolidation extends uniformly across territory, it identifies three mechanisms that explain how local contestation persists under authoritarian rule. Our argument emphasizes how territorial decoupling, territorial heterogeneity, and embedded opposition capacity create opportunities for sustained subnational resistance. Drawing on evidence from Peru under Fujimori, Turkey under Erdoğan, and Venezuela under Chávez and Maduro, we illustrate how local contestation can persist, adapt, and diffuse in non-democratic contexts. Our framework brings subnational politics to the forefront and highlights the spatial patterns through which democratic resilience emerges, persists and expands.