La calidad de la democracia a nivel subnacional en Colombia: análisis de su fluctuación en el periodo 2007-2014

The article presents a subnatio nal examination of democracy in Colombia with an adapted index. It provides conceptual and methodological elements that help to discuss the national bias. The analysis was comparative longitudinal and of democratic institutions, allowing to establish similarities and differences in the performance of these, which accounts for the quality of democracy. The results show that the quality of subnational democracy fluctuates over time and in the territory and that three patterns explain the low performance of the quality of subnational democracy in Colombia: (1) institutional dependencies, associated with a path dependency; (2) determining impact of an analysis dimension or (3) an aggregate of low values in the analysis dimensions. Finally, a relationship between national elections and low quality of democracy at the subnational level in Colombia was identified, which leads to questioning the functions of political parties.