Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Demand for Constitutional Decentralization
     Increasingly, decentralization has proven to be a policy fix advocated for and selected by developing countries whose new governments imply a significant regime change from that preceding it. This analysis adds to decentralization research by identifying the extent to which factors that lead to divergent policy preferences, such as ethnoregional diversity, result in greater definition and scope of decentralization in a given constitution. The focus lies upon the link between factors that are likely to increase citizen demand for decentralization, and whether these factors can be linked to an increase in constitutional decentralization provisions. In developing three measures of the extent to which a given constitution treats decentralization, an additional contribution of this analysis is the development of measures of constitutional detail more generally, for the way the measures were generated are not unique to decentralization provisions. In short, this analysis treats the extent of constitutionally defined decentralization as a function of demand factors theorized to lead to greater decentralization.
     Although the results of this analysis provide several fruitful avenues for future research, the initial findings are themselves thought provoking. Based upon the subset of countries surveyed, the demand factors that play a role in determining levels of constitutional decentralization include population size and cultural fractionalization of a given country. However, territorial size and ethnic fractionalization proved insignificant in determining extent of constitutional treatment of decentralization.
     Because the cultural fractionalization measure is based on linguistic divisions, the implication that language plays a greater role than ethnicity in determining demand for decentralization is an interesting one, albeit one that should be made more robust via a test utilizing the full set of the world’s constitutions. Nonetheless, such a result is in line with other recent research that emphasizes the role linguistic differences can play in determining a range of interesting outcomes. The analysis presents evidence that in larger Muslim-majority countries with greater ethnolinguistic diversity, constitutional drafters were more likely to choose a decentralized governance scheme, and treat it in greater detail when doing so.