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Parliamentary Affairs Advance Access originally published online on August 11, 2009
Parliamentary Affairs 2009 62(4):691-697; doi:10.1093/pa/gsp018
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© The Author [2009]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The Architecture of Government: Rethinking Political Decentralization

Erik Jones

SAIS Bologna Center, Johns Hopkins University

Correspondence: ejones@jhubc.it

DANIEL TREISMAN, The Architecture of Government: Rethinking Political Decentralization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 978-0-521-69382-0. 328 pp, pb. £16.99.

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.


   Generalising about the un-generaliseable
 
If there is a general bias towards political decentralisation in our current understanding of the most appropriate form of government, UCLA Professor Daniel Treisman has the antidote. Using formal analysis, occasional anecdotes and a brief survey of the large-sample empirical literature, Treisman reveals just how much of the conventional wisdom about the virtues of political decentralisation is exaggerated if not mistaken. His analysis is as sophisticated as his conclusion is disheartening—at least for those who seek to discern the laws that govern the political universe. Quite simply: the only generalisation that we can make is that there is no generalisation to be made:

In short, it is hard to reach any general conclusions about whether political – or administrative, or fiscal . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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