 Introduction: decentralization and parties. Chapter 1 in Local Accountability and National Coordination in Fiscal Federalism, 2019, pp 1-21 from Edward Elgar Publishing Abstract: This chapter introduces the book, reviews the literature on fiscal federalism and political institutions, and summarizes our arguments and empirical tests. Scholars and practitioners continue to debate the governance effects of decentralization and how to design institutions that can realize its potential benefits. We investigate the political conditions under which the decentralization of authority will improve the delivery of public goods. Building off Oates (1972) to include inter-jurisdictional spillovers, we develop a new strong decentralization theorem suggesting that the interaction of democratic decentralization and party integration produces, other things equal, the best service delivery outcomes. Across five theoretical chapters, we formalize these arguments for both majoritarian and proportional electoral systems. To test our theory we use a new dataset of subnational political institutions to explain education, health, and infrastructure service delivery in 118 countries across 30 years. These statistical results are supplemented with comparative case studies of Senegal and Nigeria. Keywords: Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:18495_1 Ordering information: This item can be ordered from Access Statistics for this chapter More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing |
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