National and regional elites in search of a compromise? Reforming regional administrative-territorial division as a problem of multilevel politics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
One of the key institutional dimensions of multilevel politics is the administrative-territorial division of the state (ATD), including its “fragmentation”, i.e. the size and number of administrative-territorial units (ATUs). Two theoretical traditions have been developed in understanding the processes of ATD reforms. The first emphasizes the central government’s intention for administrative effectiveness (“administrative motivation”), while the second focuses on the interactions between national and subnational elites pursuing their own interests (“regionalist motivation”). From this perspective, the article examines the reforms of regional ATD. Based on information from various sources, all the reforms of regional ATD in 146 countries over the past three decades have been systematized and analyzed from the view of five possible scenarios. The most common scenario is the creation of new regional ATUs within the existing ATD, while the scenarios of radical reforms aimed at either eliminating the regional level or creating it are the least common. The study demonstrates that in all five scenarios there are both the cases, where the “administrative motivation” dominates (France, Denmark, Malaysia, etc.), and the reforms caused by the “regionalist motivation”, when the goal is to satisfy the interests of regional elites (India, Canada, Ethiopia, etc.) or, conversely, to weaken regionalist movements (Laos, Pakistan, etc.). Some statistical tests indirectly indicate that both motivations occur not only in individual empirical cases, but can be considered as general trends for the countries of the world as a whole.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".