Let’s call him governor Hansl Biachl. The dictator has a big family, the Biachl-clan. Hansl is the 6th Biachl to be governor of Tyrol – the clan has consecutively held the gubernatorial seat since the late Heinzi took over in the 50’s. Eighteen Biachls currently have powerful positions in the local government. The mayor of Innsbruck is a Biachl, for example. The student representative at the Heinzi-Biachl-Universität Innsbruck is Hansl’s nephew. The Tyrol’s police director is the husband of Hansl’s sister, Christine. The family has some lawyers, too, and Hansl’s son Klausi is the president of the supreme court of Tyrol. The Biachls are very wealthy. They married into the former Royal family and are related to a certain family who sell Chrystal products. They are thriving in business – there is Uncle Karl who owns three construction companies – convenient given the vast amount of construction projects issued by Hansl. Uncle Gottfried sells Tyrolean hardwood in China – often causing flooding of the villages below. Auntie Katharina is into the local tourism sector, and works with Uncle Maximilian who builds cable cars.
Trix van Mierlo is writing her PhD at the Doctoral School Spheres of Governance: Institutions and Agency at the University of Innsbruck. Her research focuses on protest, contentious politics and social movement mobilization in consolidating democracies. She is doing a comparative study and is conducting fieldwork in three different subnational authoritarian enclaves. Furthermore, she teaches ‘Contentious Politics: Protestors and Rebels’. Trix holds a master in Conflict Studies and Human Rights (University of Utrecht), for which she conducted fieldwork in Metro Manila, the Philippines in 2017. She thereby focused on causal mechanisms underlying social movement mobilization against extrajudicial killings in the ongoing war-on-drugs. E-mail: trix.van-mierlo@uibk.ac.at.
Opposition to the Biachl’s is basically non-existent. In local elections, there are some other names on the ballot, but these people are always puppets of the clan. Some people were brave enough to run against them, such as Andreas Hofer, but he is in exile in South Tyrol due to threats to his life. On the federal level, no attempts were made to democratize the subnational authoritarian enclave of Tyrol. It is a far-flung, poor and corrupt, and the Biachl’s have proven a trustworthy party for the delivery of block-votes and ministers.
Imagine you are a Tyrolean in this context
You are a farmer, but your farmland has flooded due to intense logging higher up the mountain. You are struggling to feed your family. It is election time, so you go to visit the bus with which the Biachl clan is touring through Tyrol. You and 500 other Tyroleans rush to the bus to shake Hansl’s hand. The bus is guarded by 5 armed men – part of the private army of the Biachl’s. When you leave the bus, an armed security guard gives you a filled-out ballot, onto which a 20 euro bill is stapled. He whispers that he’ll know for whom you voted, before letting go of the ballot. In the end, you decide to vote for an opposition member who claims to combat illegal logging. To no-one’s surprise, Hansl won the election. Two months later, your daughter falls ill and is in need of hospitalization. Somehow, however, the doctor refuses to treat her. Turns out, the doctor is a niece of Christine.
What would you do?
I am well aware that this is a complicated and difficult situation to imagine – but it is based on reality. The situation I sketched is based on the data I gathered in the Philippines last spring. Pockets of authoritarianism within democratic nations are called subnational authoritarianisms. Scholars in this field seek to explain how they spread, survive, and democratize. In my research, I focus on the last factor.
Researching Social Movements
I question if and how social movements can facilitate subnational democratization. This factor has largely been neglected in the literature so far – giving no agency to the actual people in these places. Therefore, I am comparing three cases of social movement campaigns (SMC) wherein citizens made direct claims against their authoritarian governor. My three cases are SMC’s in the Philippines, Mexico and Brazil. A subnational democratization process (SND) has taken place in each case, allowing me to trace the causal mechanism between SMC and SND. For each case, I am doing fieldwork whereby I conduct interviews, hold focus groups and do archival work. I am also making a video-blog. I have a twofold aim. First, to give voice to social movement actors in the literature – to all those people who answered the “what would you do”-question with action and protest, to all of those who refused to be a passive bystander in their situations. The second aim is to have social impact on future movement actors aiming for subnational democratization.
If you are interested to learn more about social movements, I will teach a course in English in the winter semester of 2020-2021 called “Protesters and Rebels – Contentious Politics”. It is part of the optional courses of Political Science. See you there!
