The RAI travels to Latin America: Measuring regional authority under regime change

This paper presents a new dataset on regional authority in 27 Latin American and Caribbean countries for 1950-2010 based on the Regional Authority Index (RAI), which makes it possible to compare regional authority over time and across regions. We explain conceptualization, operationalization, and coding decisions with the aim of making judgments explicit, and therefore open to amendment or refutation. We present substantive observations about the variation across countries and over time and discuss the implications and challenges of expanding the RAI to contexts in which democracy and authoritarianism alternate.