ABSTRACT
Manipulating Political Decentralisation has demonstrated that even if manipulated representative SNGs contribute to sustaining and stabilising dominant party rule, they may depend on the manipulation strategy of the national government, creating unanticipated avenues for deepening democracy. In Chpater 8, we revisit the requirements needed for a subnational government to be classified as representative. We thereafter look into the relationship between the manipulating strategies, and the space for contestation and participation at the local level. Then, we discuss how our concepts, arguments and findings can be extended to cases that represent different trajectories than the cases selected for this study. We finally consider a new concept of regimes, which are autocratic, but at the same time introduce wide-ranging political decentralisation – the inclusive autocrats – before deliberating on the future for the study of political decentralisation. Whether political decentralisation reforms lead to democratisation or autocratisation is a highly empirical question, dependent on institutional frameworks and how they are manipulated. Future studies should take this into consideration by combining standard measurements of local institutions with analyses of the political topography and manipulation strategies in each case.
