Eric Alstom Spoke on 'Demand for Constitutional Decentralization'

On May 14 a research seminar on political economy took place at HSE. Eric Alstom (Charles Koch Institute) delivered a report on 'Demand for Constitutional Decentralization'.

Abstract:

Increasingly, decentralization has proven to be a policy fix advocated for and selected by developing countries whose new governments imply a significant regime change from that preceding it. As such, decentralization has been prioritized by numerous development agencies worldwide, as well as having received significant scholarly attention in the past decades. This analysis adds to such research by identifying the extent to which factors that lead to divergent policy preferences, such as ethnoregional diversity, result in greater definition and scope of decentralization in a given constitution. The analysis also provides an opportunity to test the extent to which constitutional specification of decentralization correlates to actual decentralization outcomes in practice. The focus lies upon the link between factors that are likely to increase citizen demand for decentralization, and whether these factors can be linked to an increase in constitutional decentralization provisions. In developing three measures of the extent to which a given constitution treats decentralization, an additional contribution of this analysis is the development of measures of constitutional detail more generally, for the way the measures were generated are not unique to decentralization provisions. In short, this analysis treats the extent of constitutionally defined decentralization as a function of demand factors theorized to lead to greater decentralization.