In every modern political system, power is shared to a greater or lesser
extent between levels of government. These power sharing arrangements are
perhaps most explicit in formal federal systems like the United States and
Canada, where federal constitutions define the relative powers of central
and subnational governments. They may be no less important, however, in
unitary democracies and even authoritarian regimes where central governments
require local actors to implement policy on the ground and often delegate
significant authority to them. Indeed, in any large and complex modern
society, effective governance requires some sharing of power between higher
levels of government, capable of coordinating many disparate actors and
interests, and lower levels of government, capable of responding to local
conditions.
In many parts of the world, power sharing relationships are in flux.
Nation-states in Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, and Asia are
devolving authority over diverse governmental policies to sub-national
levels of government. For example, according to Dillinger (1994), 63 of 75 developing countries with
populations above five million have undergone reforms in recent decades that
transferred significant political authority from national to local
governments. Meanwhile, governments in these same regions and elsewhere,
especially in the European Union, are together forming supra-national
institutions that can often override national laws and regulations. In many
nations, devolution and centralization occur simultaneously, with some
authority shifting to higher levels of government and some shifting to lower
levels.
We refer to such changes as authority migration. By authority migration, we
mean the movement of power within a political system—both upwards (i.e.,
centralization) and downwards (i.e., decentralization or provincialization).
In the political science literature, these movements are typically treated
as distinct and separate phenomena. Considerations of centralization
dominate studies of international organizations or regionalism, where
political actors at a relatively low level of government cede some authority
or sovereignty to higher level entities. These studies often focus on the
collective action problems inherent in creating and maintaining centralized
institutions, and the governance problems created by domestic and
international constituencies. Considerations of decentralization, by
contrast, dominate studies of policy implementation and federalism. Here the
focus tends to be on principle-agent relationships between the center and
the periphery. Research in both of these traditions has generated important
insights into the causes and consequences of authority migration, though
rarely have scholars sought to link explicitly what we know about how and
why power is centralized and how and why power is decentralized.
Upward and downward movements of political authority may share important
commonalities. Perhaps most importantly, both imply that political actors
may regard the structure of political authority as fluid and uncertain,
deliberately and strategically seeking to shift authority as a political
strategy. If so, a whole set of theoretical, methodological, and practical
questions become relevant: what factors lead government actors to shift
authority over government decision-making to higher or lower levels? Are
some institutions or political arrangements more or less resistant to such
changes? Are some policy areas more or less resistant? What are the
consequences of these migrations of political authority? What kinds of
actors win and lose and in what ways? How do political actors incorporate
future authority migrations into their decisionmaking? What methodologies
allow researchers to measure, model, and analyze the dynamics of authority
migration? These questions cut across traditional disciplinary, substantive,
and methodological boundaries and represent some of the most vexing
questions in modern political science.
By understanding better the causes and consequences of authority migration,
political scientists can begin to develop a unified framework for
understanding dynamic power sharing within political systems. To this end,
we, as directors of the University of Michigan's European Union Center
(Kollman) and Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy (Gerber) hosted a
research conference in Ann Arbor in May, 2003.1
Materials from the conference, including the complete agenda and
schedule, are available at www.closup.umich.edu.
The conference brought together scholars of law, political science, public
policy, and economics. We invited participants to present research at
various stages of development. We organized presentations into two sections:
those concerned primarily with upward migrations of authority, including
studies of international organizations, shared or pooled sovereignty, and
regionalization; and those concerned primarily with downward migrations of
authority, including studies of devolution, decentralization, and
localization. The essays represented a wide range of research methodologies,
including formal theory, normative theory, comparative case studies, and
large-n quantitative analysis, and employed a wide range of data sources
including case studies, citizen surveys, elite surveys, historical examples,
and textual analysis.
The purpose of this symposium is to synthesize some of the insights generated
by the essays and discussions covered at the conference. In this
introductory essay, we present preliminary ideas about the causes and
consequences of authority migration that emerged from the conference in Ann
Arbor. In subsequent essays, some of the conference participants discuss
their thoughts or research findings and offer more specific directions for
future research.
Causes of Authority Migration
It is useful to maintain two distinctions in characterizing past and
future research on authority migration. First, some research questions
concern the causes of authority migration while others concern the
consequences of authority migration. Any particular study, including
those described in this symposium, may seek to understand both the
causes and consequences of a given instance of authority migration. In
this section, we focus on those aspects of studies that focus most
directly on questions of causation; in the following section, we focus
on how researchers have thought about consequences.
A second useful distinction differentiates, within the broad category of
causes, between the most immediate or proximate causes of authority
migration (what we shall call “mechanisms”) and the more basic or
foundational causes (what we shall call “sources”). For example, the
sources of increasing European economic integration in the 1980s and
1990s include the need by smaller European countries to solve their
collective action problems in coordinating economic and policy responses
to German economic and political resurgence. The mechanisms of authority
migration include the European Council unanimously granting new powers
to the European Commission, or creating new European-level agencies to
enforce or decide common rules.
Some examples offer relatively straightforward instances to identify
mechanisms of authority migration. Court decisions can force local
governments to comply with centralized rules or laws, such as the
Brown v. Board of Education decision of the U.S. Supreme
Court in 1954. Military conquest from the outside can likewise impose
authority migration in direct and easily observable ways, such as when
East and West Germany were created following World War II (forcing
decentralization), or when Reconstruction in the post-Civil War United
States changed significantly, though temporarily, the locus of authority
among the Southern states (imposing centralization).
More difficult to pinpoint, but often of greater interest to political
scientists, are the fundamental or structural causes—the sources—of
authority migration. Each of the essays in this symposium deals with one
or more sources of authority migration. These include factors that exist
at the international, national, and sub-national levels. As we discuss
below, drawing heavily from this symposium's articles, each of these
factors may result in upward or downward migration of authority, or
both.
Exogenous Forces
Kahler and Lake consider how globalization—the increasing flow of
traded goods, money, information, people, and cultural symbols
across national and continental boundaries—has affected governance
or authority relationships. They critique a range of arguments that
link large-scale, exogenous forces like globalization to upward
migrations of authority, arguing instead that the effects of rapid
globalization on authority migration have been mixed. They explain
how two recent eras of heightened globalization, pre-1914, and
post-1945, experienced different patterns. During the former era,
large, imperial political structures maintained relatively
decentralized governance structures, whereas in the latter era,
there was at first an emphasis on the nation-state (especially in
the Third World), but later an emphasis on both regionalization
within nation-states, and delegation to international organizations.
Their main conclusion is that the effects of globalization on
governmental authority have been highly contingent, and one cannot
claim that globalization has clearly come at the expense of
authority at the nation-state level. Instead, authority migration
can be a strategic response to exogenous events by political elites
trying to cement their positions.
Institutional or Structural Sources
Bednar discusses features of federal political institutions that
engender authority migration. Bednar highlights three general
problems in federations: shirking by units that are supposed to
contribute to the common good of the federation, burdenshifting by
any level of government (which can include shirking but also forms
of abdication), and encroachment by one level of government into
another level's realms of authority. All three imply authority
migration with potentially longstanding consequences for the
balances of power within federations. Bednar argues that, unchecked,
these forms of authority migration are extremely dangerous as they
undermine the basic functions of federal systems. Yet Bednar's
troubling conclusion is that the temptation for actors to shift
power through these actions will always be present in a federation.
She argues that the sources of such authority migration are inherent
and inescapable within federalism itself. As such, the best one can
do is to design institutions within a federal system to manage,
rather than prevent, the inevitable shifting of political power
between levels of government.
Pressure from/Decisions by the Center
Andersson, Gibson, and Lehoucq examine the devolution of natural
resource policy in developing countries to local political actors.
The primary focus of their essay is on how local elites respond to
the transfer of authority from central governments. They find that
significant variation in the implementation of natural resource
policy at the local level can be explained by features of the local
political economy, the nature of ongoing interactions between the
center and the periphery, and personal characteristics of local
elites. In so doing, they make the important point that the impetus
for devolution of natural resource policy often comes not from local
governments, which may lack the capacity or incentives to take
advantage of their newfound authority, but rather from the central
government itself as it responds to its own political
incentives.
Pressure from/Support by Citizens at the Periphery
Hooghe and Marks explore the influence of public opinion on support
for upward authority migration in Europe. They find, after detailed
analyses of survey data in Europe, that national identity,
especially whether that identity is exclusive versus inclusive,
shapes attitudes toward authority migration in different ways. The
stronger people express ethnically-based (i.e., exclusive)
identities, the less likely they are to support European
integration, controlling for many other factors commonly found to
affect such support. In contrast, the stronger people express
inclusive, civically-based identity, the more likely they are to
support European integration, once again, controlling for many other
factors. Nationalism and pro-European preferences are not
incompatible, they conclude, and thus strong national identities (on
its face, a preference for downward authority migration) may
co-exist with support and pressure for greater European integration
(a form of upward authority migration).
Domestic Conditions
Rodden considers decentralization of fiscal authority. He describes
authority migration as the outcome of a bargaining game of
incomplete information between central and sub-national governments.
Central governments delegate some element of fiscal sovereignty to
the provinces; the response of the provinces, and hence the ultimate
impact on fiscal performance, depends to some extent on beliefs
about the center's commitment to fiscal discipline. Rodden's
approach, like Bednar's, emphasizes an inherent instability in
federal relationships. As long as there is some possibility of a
bailout by the center, sub-national governments have some incentive
to shirk, effectively shifting their power (or responsibility) back
to the center. His essay then explores explanations for differences
in the degree of fiscal decentralization across countries,
emphasizing domestic factors such as regime type, civil wars,
structure of political parties, and income inequality.
Consequences of Authority Migration
In the economics literature, one of the primary sources of authority
migration is the desire for improved economic performance. Policies
adopted at some levels of government may be better able to achieve
certain economic outcomes than policies adopted at other levels. For
example, when economic activities have important spill-over effects,
political actors may have an incentive to shift authority upwards to
internalize those externalities. When significant preference
heterogeneity exists, actors may have an incentive to shift authority
downwards to capture and reflect those diverse preferences in
policy.2
See Kahler and Lake, this
symposium, for a more extensive summary of this
literature.
The essays in this symposium articulate a more
nuanced view of the conditions under which these improvements in
outcomes may or may not be captured, based largely on an appreciation of
the political constraints actors face.
Economic Performance
Two essays emphasize the conditionality of the claim that political
decentralization results in better economic performance. Andersson,
Gibson, and Lehoucq argue that decentralizing natural resource
policy may improve economic performance, in the sense of leading
local officials to dedicate more staff and resources to conserving
forest resources, but that this depends importantly on local actors'
incentives and ongoing oversight by the center. Likewise, Rodden
argues that decentralizing fiscal sovereignty can enhance fiscal
performance; whether it does so depends on the center's commitment
to that decentralization. Together, the common conclusion of these
essays points to a more general issue, which is that the ongoing
relationship between political actors after a migration of authority
may be as important to its ultimate consequences as the original
transfer of power itself.
Citizen Attitudes and Support
Hooghe and Marks suggest that there is reciprocal cause and effect
between upward migration and public opinion change. The march of
European integration over the past 50 years has deepened feelings of
both nationalism and of being European among certain sectors of
European populations. These attitudes, in turn, affect the pace of
authority migration by influencing member governments' decisions to
support or oppose increasing integration.
Stability
Bednar discusses the dangers of persistent encroachment and burden
shifting among levels of government in a federation. When these
shifts of authority become severe, the delicate federal balance is
disrupted, federations break down, and the result may be extreme
instability—secession or civil war or both. Fortunately, at least
two sets of factors exist to counteract these potentially disruptive
migrations of authority and hence ensure greater stability. First,
federal institutions themselves, including court and political party
systems, provide safeguards by which political actors can manage,
mitigate, and circumvent these potential sources of instability. And
second, actors at all levels may have incentives to tolerate some
small-scale migrations of authority, allowing for adjustments in
power-sharing relationships within a broadly stable system.
Governance
Kahler and Lake suggest that authority migration may diminish the
ability of citizens to assign blame and responsibility across levels
of government. With upward or downward movement, citizens and
leaders can become confused over whether authority has been
delegated or whether it has truly shifted. In the former case, the
authority can be returned to the principal, whereas in the latter,
there is no guarantee of going back to a previous arrangement. From
the outside these two phenomena may be observationally equivalent,
and the confusion can have important implications for election
outcomes, public opinion, and even the possibilities of military
conflict.
An Emerging Research Agenda
As Kahler and Lake discuss in their essay, economists typically focus on
how efficient federal systems are in allocating resources; in a similar
vein, public administration and policy scholars pay close attention to
measurable consequences of changes in management structures within
governments. Political scientists are more apt to place the incentives
of political actors who are embedded in power sharing arrangements at
the center of these processes. These political actors care deeply about
who gets what under which kinds of authority allocations—in other words,
they care about the distribution of resources. Political scientists also
have a keen sense that exogenous shocks explain only part of the story
of authority migration, and that the outcomes from bargaining taking
place among actors at different levels of government, outcomes that are
hard to predict, shape how power is allocated institutionally with
lasting consequences for countries and regions.
In this spirit, we believe that future studies of authority migration
will be well served by incorporating some of the key insights generated
by the essays in this symposium:
- Political actors
seek to reallocate authority to achieve their political and
policy objectives.
- The consequences of authority
migration are highly contingent upon the choices made by
political actors, and citizens and leaders may be uncertain
about the effects of these choices.
- Authority
migration does not happen mechanistically, but occurs in the
context of bargaining among levels of
government.
- Bargaining over authority migration takes
place in situations where there are options to move authority up
or down from its current level. In other words, the same factors
can cause either upward or downward migration of authority, and
which occurs can depend on interactions with other
factors.
In taking stock of the ideas presented and discussed in our conference
and in the essays included in this symposium, we find reasons to be
optimistic about prospects for a unified research program on authority
migration. At the same time, we are realistic about the limits of our
present knowledge and of the current approach to the study of authority
migration, which is to examine a small part of the puzzle and understand
that part well. Integrative research on authority migration is rare.
Some of the authors in this symposium have used a wide lens, working to
link the causes and consequences of authority migration, and upward and
downward migration, into a single study. We applaud these efforts and
encourage more of the same.
SYMPOSIUM AUTHORS' BIOS
Krister P. Andersson is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for
the Study of Institutions, Population and Environmental Change (CIPEC)
at Indiana University. He studies the institutional aspects of
decentralized natural resource management, forest carbon sequestration
activities, and international development cooperation. Andersson's
research has appeared in World Development, Journal of Environment
and Development, and Climate Policy. His work on
decentralized forest governance in Bolivia is featured in his book¿
Cómo hacer funcionar la gestión forestal descentralizada?
(Plural Editores 2004).
Jenna Bednar is assistant professor of political science and
faculty associate in the Center for Political Studies, and faculty
affiliate of the Olin Center for Law and Economics at the University of
Michigan. She is currently working on a book entitled The Robust
Federation.
Elisabeth R. Gerber is professor of public policy at the Gerald
R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, and is
director of the Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy.
Her research focuses on the policy consequences of electoral laws and
state and local political institutions. She has published numerous
papers and two recent books on the use of initiatives and referendums
(The Populist Paradox and Stealing the Initiative). She is
co-editor of volumes on Michigan's economy and public policy environment
(Michigan at the Millennium) and California's blanket
primary law (Voting at the Political Fault Line). Gerber is
currently involved in studies of local land use policy,
intergovernmental cooperation, local political accountability, and the
dynamics of local ballot initiatives.
Clark C. Gibson is associate professor of political science at
the University of California, San Diego. His research focuses on the
politics of development, democracy, and the environment and he has
published work based on fieldwork in Africa, Central and South America,
and the United States. Gibson's research about the politics of wildlife
policy in Africa appears in his book Politicians and Poachers: The
Political Economy of Wildlife Policy in Africa (Cambridge,
1999). He is co-author of the forthcoming volume Samaritans' Dilemma:
The Political Economy of Foreign Aid (Oxford). He is also
the co-editor of two books: People and Forests: Communities,
Institutions, and Governance (MIT, 2000) and Communities
and the Environment: Ethnicity, Gender and the State in
Community-Based Conservation (Rutgers, 2001).
Liesbet Hooghe is associate professor at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and research professor at the Free University of
Amsterdam. She wrote The European Commission and European
Integration: Images of Governance (CUP, 2002), and has
published widely on multi-level governance, elites, and political
parties.
Miles Kahler is Rohr Professor of pacific international
relations at the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific
Studies and director of the Institute for International, Comparative,
and Area Studies at the University of California, San Diego. From 1994
to 1996 he was senior fellow in International Political Economy at the
Council on Foreign Relations. His publications include Governance in
a Global Economy, co-edited with David Lake (Princeton
University Press, 2003) and Leadership Selection in the Major
Multilaterals.
Ken Kollman is professor of political science and research
professor in the Center for Political Studies at the University of
Michigan. He is the author of Outside Lobbying: Public Opinion and
Interest Group Strategies, and The Formation of National
Party Systems: Federalism and Party Competition in Canada, Great
Britain, India, and the United States (co-authored with Pradeep
Chhibber). Both books are published by Princeton University Press.
David A. Lake is professor of political science at the
University of California, San Diego. He has published widely in
international relations theory, international political economy, and
American foreign policy. In addition to numerous articles, he is the
author of Power, Protection, and Free Trade: International Sources
of U.S. Commercial Strategy, 1887–1939 (1988) and
Entangling Relations: American Foreign Policy in its
Century (1999). Most recently, he is co-editor of The
International Spread of Ethnic Conflict: Fear, Diffusion, and
Escalation (1998); Strategic Choice and International
Relations (1999); and Governance in a Global Economy:
Political Authority in Transition (2003).
Fabrice E. Lehoucq is research professor in the division of
political studies at the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas
(CIDE) in Mexico City. He is a specialist in comparative politics,
institutional analysis, and international affairs. His research focuses
on democratization, electoral fraud, and reform and decentralization.
Lehoucq's work has appeared in Comparative Politics, Electoral
Studies, the Journal of Latin American Studies, and
the Social Science Quarterly. Most recently, he has co-authored
the book Stuffing the Ballot Box: Fraud, Reform, and Democratization
in Costa Rica (Cambridge, 2002) with Iván Molina.
Gary Marks is Burton Craige Professor at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill and research professor at the Free University of
Amsterdam. His most recent books are European Integration and
Political Conflict (CUP, 2004), co-edited with Marco
Steenbergen, and Multi-Level Governance and European
Integration (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001), co-authored with
Liesbet Hooghe.
Jonathan Rodden is Ford Career Development Associate Professor
of Political Science at MIT, and is currently a visiting scholar at the
Center for Basic Research in the Social Sciences at Harvard. His
research and teaching focus on the political economy of institutions and
geography.
The authors acknowledge the financial support of the European Commission
and the University of Michigan's Center for Political Studies, European
Union Center, and Center for Local, State, and Urban Policy.
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