Any democratic nation-state must resolve two fundamental problems. It
must devise institutions to govern at the local scale
within a wider territorial state, and it must link both local governance
and citizens to decision-making at the national scale. How
a country addresses these problems is critical to the quality of its
democracy. This project compares the infrastructures of
governmental and civic organizations tthat mediate and set the terms
for these linkages across the developed world and beyond.
We are especially interested in how different institutional infrastructures
of multilevel local linkages have emerged and developed,
and their consequences for the performance of policy and the operation
of democracy. The project draws on the first systematic
international comparative database of indicators for local governance
institutions, which now encompasses 43 countries.
Multilevel Democracy: How Local Institutions and Civil Society Shape the Modern State
(Cambridge University Press, 2020) (co-authored with
Anders Lidström and Yooil Bae).
Multilevel Democracy, Online Supplementary Document (includes detailed sources for numerous tables and figures, and additional tables and figures referred to in the book) (on the Cambridge University Press website)
Local Linkages Data files (Harvard Dataverse)
Local Linkages Codebook and Source List (Harvard Dataverse)
Multilevel Democracy: Tabulation of survey data (Tables 3.10 and 3.11) (Harvard Dataverse)
Multilevel Democracy: Historical Local Public Expenditures Database and Source List (Figures 6.1 - 6.3)(download)
"Urban Governance and Institutions in the Developing and Developed Worlds: Toward a Comparative Historical Perspective", Croatian and Comparative Public Administration 16(3): 459-478 (2016).
"Trois
modèles de gouvernance multiniveau au-delà du clivage
état-société", Téléscope,
19(1): 62 - 84 (2013)
(Link
to English translation).
"Decentralization,
Local Government and the Welfare State", Governance 20 (4):
609-632 (2007).
"Comparing
Local Governance Systems in Developed Democracies" (2006)
(working paper with 21-country dataset
for 1995, with detailed explanations and sources for country codings).
