Beyond the notion of a general trend of increasing regional authority, the timing and causes of decentralisation reforms remain a puzzle to functionalist economists as well as political scientists. The decentralisation theorem lacks a consistent answer to decades of observable counterfactuals – the absence of reforms in regions with the same theoretical likelihood.
We try to resolve this puzzle by comparing the electoral prospects of national government parties on the national and regional level. Relative electoral performance is assumed to be the main driver of governments to decentralise authority.
However, governments play different decentralisation games in different contexts. The main difference is whether regionally concentrated national minorities exist. If so, asymmetrical shifts of authority may be institutionalised, in exchange for legislative support on the national level. Regions without national minorities are usually treated equal. Hence, governments calculate electoral trends encompassing all regions. Our main argument is assumed to hold for both scenarios: The electoral success of the government parties on the national level in relation to electoral performance on the regional level is supposed to affect the likelihood of governments to decentralize authority.
We test this hypothesis with a panel analysis including 21 OECD countries and their regions for the time period of 1950 to 2006. We use the first difference of the regional authority index and its constituent parts as dependent variables. Relative vote shares of government parties in national and regional elections covering different time periods are applied to measure the relative electoral performance on both levels.
Preliminary results indicate robust explanatory power of electoral concerns as an important explanatory factor in decentralisation processes. Governments hesitate to transfer authority to regions with stable opposition majorities, regardless of functionalist concerns about its necessity. The downward shift of competencies in regions dominated by political allies is much more likely.
