Multilevel Democracy
How Local Institutions and Civil Society Shape the Modern State

Explores ways to make democracy work better, with particular focus on the integral role of local institutions.

Jefferey M. Sellers (Author), Anders Lidström (Author), Yooil Bae (Author)

9781108427784, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 5 March 2020

407 pages, 23 b/w illus. 35 tables
23.4 x 15.7 x 3 cm, 0.65 kg

'… an impressive body of research literature and masses of quantitative data … it is probably primarily of interest for researchers of public administration, but the parts about 'civil society' will raise the interest of Voluntas readers. The authors describe interesting fits between governance infrastructures on the one hand and the political and civic organizations on the other. The book has a broad scope: a wide variety of sources and literature from public administration, political science, history, economy, and civil society studies. It is more about being careful with the heritage than about building democracy from scratch.' Paul Dekker, Voluntas

This volume presents the first systematic comparative analysis of national traditions of local democracy across the developed world, as well as their origins and evolution. It reveals how inclusive local institutions that integrate national and local governance make democracy work better. Across most of the developed world, early forms of the national state entrenched the local power of elites. In Anglo-American and Swiss democracies, state formation imposed enduring tensions with local civic governance. In contrast, inclusive, integrative local institutions in Northern Europe enabled close links with central government around common local and national agendas, producing better governance and fuller democracy to the present day. Through comparative analysis, the authors demonstrate how institutions for local governance and the participation of civil society differ widely among developed democracies, and how local democracy relates to national democracy. The resulting insights fundamentally recast our understanding of how to build and maintain more effective democracies.

1. Introduction: taking local institutions seriously
2. Multilevel democracy and the modern state
3. Multilevel democracies: a cross-sectional comparison
4. Trajectories of local state formation
5. The local state and the formation of civil society
6. The policy state and local governance
7. The quality of multilevel democracy
Postscript. Constructing multilevel democracy.

Subject Areas: Comparative politics [JPB], Politics & government [JP], Sociology [JHB]