Extreme events and the resilience of decentralized governance

Extreme events, such as economic crises, pandemics, natural disasters, or military conflicts, can affect the balance between centralization and decentralization forces across countries and transform, temporarily or more permanently, the design of multilevel governance. Using a panel for 91 developing and developed countries from 1960 to 2018, and another one for OECD countries during 1995-2018, we examine the effects of extreme external shocks on the decentralization level. We find that internal conflicts boost decentralization in both OECD and non-OECD countries, while natural disasters reduce decentralization in non-OECD countries, but not so in OECD members. Moreover, those effects are long lasting in both cases of extreme events. Finally, economic recessions are the less relevant kind of shocks. They do not have significant effects on the level of decentralization, except for expenditure decentralization in OECD countries.