The Migration of Authority in Europe: When, Why and How Do Territorial Reforms Occur?

Political decentralisation is a wide-spread phenomenon that constitutes one of the single most important sources of transformation in state authority. Decentralist reforms have resulted in symmetric or asymmetric territorial arrangements, in which constituent entities enjoy similar or distinct levels of de jure autonomy. So, the ‘migration of authority’ has been prompted and driven in different directions at different times, by different political actors with a clearly defined set of interests and objectives. This paper aims to identify when, why and how different types of territorial reforms occur.  To achieve this, it focuses on the origins and outcomes of attempts to carry out different types of reforms. We investigate the different sets of conditions which bring to the emergence of a strong political impetus for (1) centralist reforms, (2) symmetric decentralist reforms, (3) asymmetric decentralist reforms. In addition, we analyse the sets of conditions under which these three different types of reforms are actually carried out or not (i.e. reform vs. no reform). To identify the set of conditions producing (or not) these different reforms, we analyse a set of 45 attempted and successful reforms in eight countries in Western, Central and Eastern Europe, (Belgium, Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, Spain, Slovakia, UK) and two countries on Europe’s borders (Ukraine and Turkey), from the 1970s to the present. We use qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) in order to uncover the different configurations of factors producing these different outcomes.