Lecture 7

• Political Science: Session 7 is about Multi-level Government, Lecturer: dr Ammar Maleki.
• In Session 6, topics discussed include executives, regime types or types of government, presidential power, executive in different regime types, and bureaucracies.
• Multilevel government: concept and rationale, types of distribution of sovereignty, federations, ways of distributing power, levels of governance (regional and local governance), reasons and challenges of decentralization are topics outlined in Session 7.
• Multilevel governance is an administrative system in which power is distributed and shared horizontally and vertically among different levels of government, from the supranational to the local, with considerable interaction among the parts.
• Mechanisms for citizen engagement can include periodic elections, citizen consultation, local audits, and direct citizen decision-making on budgets.
• Center-local relations can involve tensions between local accountability and central grants.
• The structure for political accountability can include a single or plural executive, type of electoral system, and use of reserved seats.
• The impact on outcomes can vary depending on the design and implementation of the system.
• The financial structure can involve local taxes such as property, income, business, and vehicles.
• The size of units and number of levels can impact administrative costs and citizen participation.
• Multilevel governance develops from multilevel government.
• Multilevel governance involves actors from a range of sectors: public, private, voluntary.
• Decentralization is the transfer of roles and responsibilities from the central government to different sub-national units, which can include administrative decentralization, fiscal decentralization, and political decentralization.
• Due to high power devolution from the central government to provinces and local communities, John's country can be categorized as a cooperative federation.
• Unitary states, Hybrid Unions, and Federal states are the three types of political structures, each with a specific degree of administrative, fiscal, and political decentralization.
• In dual federalism, implementation is the duty of the national government, national and local governments function together, responsibilities of national and local governments are intermingled, and national and local governments have different responsibilities.
• Decentralization is growing worldwide due to bottom-up demand, aspirations of nationalist movements, and the role of international development agencies.
• Multilevel governance aims to find solutions to shared problems through give-and-take among affected interests.
• Many unitary systems meet the first criterion (and some meet the third as well) but by definition they do not meet the second.
• A modern alternative to states is free trade areas without sovereignty issues.
• Fractionalization is the probability that two randomly drawn individuals from the population belong to two different groups, with its theoretical maximum being reached when each person belongs to a different group.
• Institutional criteria of federalism include independently elected subnational and national governmental institutions, a constitution that guarantees sovereignty to the subnational governments and provide some distribution of responsibilities between national and subnational, and institutions to represent subnational preferences within national political institutions (bicameralism).
• There is still interest in ethnic federations, however with the danger of reinforcing the divisions they were designed to accommodate.
• Alesina et al (2003) developed a fractionalization measure for 215 countries and territories.
• The main historical incentive for the formation of states was to secure the military and economic advantages of scale, in response to strong competitors.
• Ethnic fractionalization in the world is highest in countries with weak institutions, as per a map by the Washington Post.
• Modes of fractionalization include ethnicity, language, religion, and not all modes of fractionalization are politically/socially salient.
• For a federal system, all three criteria should be met.
• Challenges of multilevel governance include being a complicated, slow-moving form of regulation; a network that is difficult to command.
• Civil society, public sector, private sector, supra-national, international NGOs and global networks of activists, multinational and regional government, international corporations, national, national interest groups, non-governmental organizations, voluntary societies, nation-state, central organs of the national legislature, core executive and bureaucracy, and national judiciary are involved in multilevel governance.
• Types of distribution of sovereignty include unitary states, where sovereignty lies exclusively with the central government, and federalism (federation), a form of multilevel governance sharing sovereignty between two levels, central and state (or provincial) government.
• Federations have exclusive, concurrent and residual powers, and are common in large (measured by area or population) countries, or deeply divided societies.
• Asymmetric federalism is a type of federation where some states within a federation have more autonomy than others, in response to cultural differences (e.g. Quebec in Canada).
• Dual federalism is a type of federation where national and subnational governments operate independently, for example, the USA model.
• Cooperative federalism is a type of federation where collaboration between levels occurs, for example, the German model.
• Two routes to a federation are: coming together by creating a new central authority, as in the USA, and holding together by transferring sovereignty to lower levels, as in Belgium.
• The USA is often considered a unitary state, while the EU is often considered a confederation.
• A quasi-federation, also known as a semi-federal or hybrid union, is formally unitary but has some features of a federation, with some independent powers recognized for certain constituent territorial units.
• The European Union (EU) is often compared to the USA, with both having a single federal government, an elected legislature, a single market, a single currency, a single legal citizenship, a federal tax, a common trade policy, a common foreign and defense policy, a combined arm force, a single seat at international organizations, and a shared identity.
• Types of distribution of sovereignty include a unitary state, a confederation, a quasi-federation, and a federation.