ECPR

Install the app

Install this application on your home screen for quick and easy access when you’re on the go.

Just tap Share then “Add to Home Screen”

ECPR

Install the app

Install this application on your home screen for quick and easy access when you’re on the go.

Just tap Share then “Add to Home Screen”

Authority to Friends. A Aystematic Analysis of Partisan Rationales in Symmetric de/Centralization Reforms

Comparative Politics
Federalism
Political Parties
Regionalism
Political Ideology
Leonce Röth
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München – LMU
André Kaiser
University of Cologne
Leonce Röth
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München – LMU

Abstract

After a long dominance of functionalist approaches, partisan rationales have recently taken centre stage in explaining the symmetric migration of authority over different levels of governance. Our analysis provides the first systematic test of different partisan explanations of symmetric de/centralization reforms. In a first step, we identify five theoretical rationales for parties to shift authority symmetrically: ideological insulation (Röth & Kaiser 2016), intra-party insulation (O’Neill 2003, 2005), electoral vulnerability (Alonso 2012), central encroachment and burden shifting (both Bednar 2004). In a second step, we discuss the operationalization of the different rationales. We take advantage of a newly compiled dataset including territorial reforms disaggregated by policy areas, electoral data on the regional and national level and government ideologies on the first two tiers. The operationalization of the rationales illustrates that some of the theories are underspecified. For example, the central encroachment rationale does not specify when or where a specific party has an incentive to encroach on the authority of lower levels. Hence, the operationalization of the central encroachment rationale as it stands is not possible. In a third step, we test the explanatory power of the remaining rationales of symmetric territorial reforms in 24 countries from 1945 to 2013. Combined with several variables controlling for opportunity structures, we test the systematic causal effects of the different partisan rationales in multi-level Poisson regressions. Our findings indicate that ideological insulation is present in almost all cases of symmetric decentralization reforms and consequently has the highest likelihood to explain those events. Intra-party insulation is also positively and significantly related to symmetric reforms of decentralization. Burden shifting and electoral vulnerability fail to systematically explain the reforms under scrutiny, although we know from the coding process that burden shifting plays a role in some cases.