EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Rethinking the Political Economy of Decentralization: How Elections and Parties Shape the Provision of Local Public Goods

Raúl A Ponce-Rodríguez, Charles Hankla (), Jorge Martinez-Vazquez () and Eunice Heredia-Ortiz
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Raul Alberto Ponce Rodriguez

Publius: The Journal of Federalism, 2018, vol. 48, issue 4, 523-558

Abstract: As more and more of the world’s states devolve power and resources to sub-national governments, decentralization has emerged as one of the most important global trends of the new century. Yet, there is still no consensus as to the benefits of decentralization and how to design institutions that can realize these benefits. We investigate the political conditions under which the decentralization of authority will improve the delivery of public goods. Building off Oates’ “decentralization theorem” to include inter-jurisdictional spillovers, we develop a new theory suggesting that the interaction of democratic decentralization (the popular election of sub-national governments) and party centralization (the power of national party leaders over sub-national office-seekers) will produce the best service delivery outcomes. To test this argument empirically, we develop a new dataset of sub-national political institutions. Our analyses, which examine educational and health service delivery in 135 countries across thirty years, provide support for our theoretical expectations.

Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/publius/pjy003 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Rethinking the political economy of decentralization: how elections and parties shape the provision of local public goods (2016) Downloads
Working Paper: Rethinking the Political Economy of Decentralization: How Elections and Parties Shape the Provision of Local Public Goods (2012) Downloads
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:publus:v:48:y:2018:i:4:p:523-558.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Publius: The Journal of Federalism is currently edited by Paul Nolette and Philip Rocco

More articles in Publius: The Journal of Federalism from CSF Associates Inc. Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-31
Handle: RePEc:oup:publus:v:48:y:2018:i:4:p:523-558.