Regional political institutions

A trend of decentralization has introduced tremendous variation in the design of regional political institutions. We develop and apply a novel approach to map power dispersion that differs from previous mapping exercises of (regional) democracy in three important aspects. First, power dispersion is tapped along a vertical dimension within a region as well as between regions and the national level. Second, we separate input (institutional) from output (behavioural) indicators. Third, output indicators are applied to regional voters, parliaments as well as executives and input indicators tap the relations between these actors, i.e., electoral systems and executive-legislative relations. Principal component analyses reveal that power dispersion on the horizontal and vertical dimensions are distinct and can explain more than 80 per cent of the variance in regional political institutions. Importantly, our mapping exercise reveals that some regions are more like regions from other countries than fellow regions from their own country.