exists in the use of alternative political technologies; for instance bribes by the rich and protests by the poor are likely … to be countervailing forces, and will both occur in polities with weaker political institutions. …

provision. We define centralization as the bundled provision of public goods from different tiers (national, sub-national or … efficiency advantage to centralization because the central provider can reallocate resources among the different tiers of public … public goods increases electoral control. Finally, we compare both effects and find that centralization will dominate over …

externalities under representative and direct democratic institutions. A model with two regions, two public goods and regional …

This paper provides a political-economy explanation of the degree of centralization in economic policy making. To … determine which policies are to be centralized, regions select representatives who then negotiate the degree of centralization … and the regional cost shares of centrally decided policies. We show that the resulting degree of centralization is …