Multilevel Democracy

Jefferey Sellers is an Associate Professor of Political Science, Public Policy and Spatial Sciences at the University of Southern California. He wrote Governing From Below (Cambridge, 2002) and has received numerous grants from the US National Science Foundation and other sources. Anders Lidström is a Professor of Political Science at Umeå Universitet, Sweden. He serves on the Group of Independent Experts on the European Charter of Local Self-Government, Council of Europe. Yooil Bae is a Lecturer and Founding Faculty of Fulbright School of Public Policy and Management at Fulbright University Vietnam. He is a member of the Civil Society in Asia research group and the author of Mega-Events and Mega Ambition (2018).

• 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.

'This book restores local democracy to its rightful place at the center of our understanding of national politics. Through an illuminating, comparative historical analysis, the authors show that systematic variations in local political incorporation have laid down enduring differences in the character of multilevel democracy, with far-reaching consequences for policymaking and the quality of democracy. A must-read!' Christopher Ansell, University of California, Berkeley