American Political Science Review
- American Political Science Review / Volume / Issue 04 / November 2005, pp 567-581
- Copyright © 2005 by the American Political Science Association
- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0003055405051889 (About DOI), Published online: 31 October 2005
Centripetal Democratic Governance: A Theory and Global Inquiry
AbstractWhy are some democratic governments more successful than others? What impact do various political institutions have on the quality of governance? This paper develops and tests a new theory of democratic governance. This theory, which we label centripetalism, stands in contrast to the dominant paradigm of decentralism. The centripetal theory of governance argues that democratic institutions work best when they are able to reconcile the twin goals of centralized authority and broad inclusion. At the constitutional level, our theory argues that unitary, parliamentary, and list-PR systems (as opposed to decentralized federal, presidential, and nonproportional ones) help promote both authority and inclusion, and therefore better governance outcomes. We test the theory by examining the impact of centripetalism on eight indicators of governance that range across the areas of state capacity, economic policy and performance, and human development. Results are consistent with the theory and robust to a variety of specifications. Correspondence: c1 John Gerring is Professor, Department of Political Science, Boston University, 232 Bay State Road, Boston MA 02215 (jgerring@bu.edu). c2 Strom C. Thacker is Professor, Boston University, Department of International Relations, 152 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215 (sthacker@bu.edu). c3 Carola Moreno is Ph.D. candidate, Department of Economics, 270 Bay State Road, Boston, MA 02215 (cmoreno@bu.edu). |
