This dissertation brings to light the puzzle of decentralization reforms that do not transfer power to governors and mayors. Although it is generally assumed that decentralization increases the power of subnational officials, I show that if we unpack this concept into its fiscal, administrative, and political components, two of these types of reforms (administrative and fiscal) can have a negative impact on the autonomy of governors and mayors from the president. To explain these findings, I propose a sequential theory of decentralization that has three central features. First, it introduces the preferences of presidents, governors, and mayors for different types and levels of decentralization. Second, it distinguishes between the partisan and territorial interests of the political actors who push for decentralization reforms and identifies six types of decentralization coalitions (national-level, subnational, ruling, opposition, and two types of mixed coalitions) based on those interests. Third, it rejects the limitations of static theories of decentralization in favor of a dynamic account of institutional evolution that incorporates the effects of policy feedback on preference formation and power reproduction.
The main argument of the dissertation is that the sequence and timing of fiscal, administrative, and political decentralization, and the type of political coalition that initiates each round of reforms, are key determinants of the resulting evolution of intergovernmental balance of power. I measure intergovernmental balance of power using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data that include the share of expenditures of subnational governments, policy-making authority, political appointment authority, and territorial representation of interests in the national legislatures.
I test the argument by comparing the ways in which decentralization policies originated and unfolded in Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia between 1978 and 1999. I combine institutional and bargaining analysis to show that decentralization trajectories that include early political reforms and that are pushed from below by subnational actors lead to the strengthening of governors and mayors, as happened in Colombia and Mexico. In contrast, when decentralization begins with an administrative reform and is imposed from above by the national executive, it does not transfer power downwards, as I argue occurred in Argentina.
