Beyond federalism: Estimating and explaining the territorial structure of government

This article suggests that the basic distinction between federal and unitary government has limited as well as served our understanding of government. The notion that variation in the structure of government is a difference of kind rather than degree has straight-jacketed attempts to estimate the authority of intermediate government. One result has been the claim that a country’s foot-print, not its population, is decisive for government. Analyzing data for thirty-nine countries since 1950, and comparing our own findings with those of alternative measurements, we find evidence for the causal effect of population. This can be theorized in terms of a trade-off between respon-siveness to soft information and per-capita economies in public good provision. The structure of government—the allocation of authority across general purpose jurisdictions—is a deep and puzzling phenomenon. Philosophers from Hobbes to Madison to Ostrom, and political scientists from Riker and Elazar to Lijphart have sought to explain why some countries are, or should be, decentralized while others are centralized. Since the creation of the United States, government structure has been conceived as a basic choice between a unitary and a federal system. A unitary system is one in which decision making may be deconcentrated or even decentralized, but final authority rests with the center. A federal system, by contrast, disperses authority between ‘‘regional governments and a central government in such a way that each kind of government has some activities on which it makes final decisions’’ (Riker 1987, 101). Most importantly, regions or their representatives can veto constitutional reform. Each conception is rooted in a coherent, but opposing, philosophy: ‘‘The contrast between Hobbes ’ formulation of the institutions of government and that formulated in the American experiments in constitutional choice suggests that fundamentally different approaches exist for the organization of governance in human societies. In the one, a single center of authority, the sovereign, is designe