Collaborative Research on Political Competition and Decentralization in Democracies

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This collaborative research team employs computational and mathematical models to improve an understanding of the nature and performance of decentralized political systems. The project has two principal goals. The first is to understand better the advantages and disadvantages of different institutional arrangements in federal political systems. More specifically, the investigators study the effects of different degrees of power-sharing and coordination among central and local governments. The methodological goal is to continue extending and analyzing computational models as a methodology in political science and the social sciences in general. In federal systems, there are several layers of institutions, including those in the central government, those that specify relations between the central government and local governments, and those that decide policies at the local level. The basic idea behind the project is that a federal system as a whole (a country or an international organization like the European Union) can benefit when local jurisdictions develop innovative policies, yet incentives for policy experimentation are not independent of institutions set up at the system-wide level or at the local level. The researchers analyze closely models that incorporate institutions resembling those in two federal systems, the United States and the European Union.