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Multilevel Democracy, Civil Society and the Development of the Modern State

Year: 2014
Type: preprint
Abstract: Despite growing attention to decentralization in comparative politics, the role of local governance in wider patterns of state-society relations remains under-theorized and little understood. To address this deficit, this paper presents an empirical theory of multilevel local linkages, civil society and the state. The theory reformulates the theory of state infrastructural power to take into account local institutions and civic organization under conditions of representative democracy. The theory proposes a relationship between two sets of institutions that are usually considered separately, and as separate: institutions of local government and territorial administration and the organization of civil society. Together, these institutions link local government to civil society, and local governance to policymaking at the heights of the state. Alternative models of this infrastructure furnish the basis for a novel empirical typology of infrastructures for multilevel local governance. The models depend on state and local elites, on local civil society, or on an integrated multilevel system of policymaking and civic organization. Comparative historical analysis of France, the United States and Sweden shows these variations to be the result of long-term, endogenous trajectories of institutional development. The institutional logics of the models emerged with the consolidation of local state infrastructures and civic organization in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The twentieth century policy state, devoted to social welfare, economic development, and other collective ends, consolidated infrastructures of local governance around distinct institutional logics in each country.
Language: English
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2297326734
Cites: 67
Cited by: 3
Related to: 10