Leadership in crisis response has traditionally been strongly centralized and hierarchical. Top-down command and control is popular, because a strict hierarchy and clear lines of command enable rapid decision-making and coordinated actions. Critics, however, have argued that centralization is both impossible and undesirable during crises, because leaders lack situational awareness and cannot control frontline responders from a distance. They argue that operational personnel should take charge to ensure an adaptive frontline response, potentially at the cost of efficiency and speed. The operational dilemma of crisis leadership revolves therefore around the tension between centralization and decentralization. To deal with this dilemma, it is useful to study how influence is exercised and power circulates during crises. Rather than a static authority structure, different types and phases of crises require different forms of leadership. Authority structures have to be tested and adjusted throughout the response, so they can be continuously co-constructed by frontline responders and operational leaders, as the complex and dynamic crisis situation evolves.

Some people take orders all day. Others give them. And most people are somewhere in the middle. While relations of “who orders whom” are generally established through formalized hierarchies of authority, informal relations such as business partnerships and even friendships are also frequently hierarchical in some way: some business partners have more control over important resources, some friends have more clout. Indeed, status and reputation structure almost all areas of social life. To understand social structure, we must attend to both horizontal relations in which individuals are connected through frequently mutual feelings of belonging, as well as vertical relations of power, authority, deference, and status that are asymmetric. Ultimately, how community and hierarchy combine is one of the most vexing concerns in the social sciences. Building on the previous chapter’s focus on groups and cohesion, this chapter focuses on aspects of social structures that are more asymmetric, centralized, or hierarchical.

Has decentralization contributed to democratic accountability, civic engagement, transparency, and efforts to combat corruption in the contemporary Arab region? This chapter presents key findings from a two-year study assessing decentralization policies and initiatives in five countries – Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, and Yemen. The chapter discusses several findings of our fieldwork. One is the legacy of colonial experiences which made deconcentration rather than decentralization prevail. Another is the simultaneous promotion and subversion of decentralization, which was not only practiced by governments across the region, but was often subsidized by international assistance. Still another finding discusses how effectiveness of local governments in the region is constrained by opaque regulatory environments and limited human and financial resources at their disposal. Finally, our study also points to instances of success and innovation, against many odds, where capable leadership, engaged civil society, and other factors have paved the way toward palpable improvements in service delivery and urban management. Accordingly, we find that, despite many constraints, decentralization policies in the Arab region may occasionally present significant policy windows that could form opportunities for social, political, and economic changes, if mobilized adequately.

Chapter 5 investigates the fifteenth-century ballad A Gest of  Robyn Hode as protest literature set against the encroachment of government centralization on the political autonomy of the North of England. Robin Hood’s theft and murder of government officials ironically informs the outlaw’s own expressed love for the king, calling to mind the relationships between the crown and the northern magnates, such as the Percy earls of Northumberland, in the later Middle Ages. In one striking scene from the Gest, King Edward and Robin Hood ride out of the forest together, dressed in Robin’s livery of Lincoln green. This juxtaposition of the king of England with the king of outlaws implies the complexities with which the poem contemplates law and sovereignty, complexities attendant to the remarkable development of sovereign theory from the early-thirteenth century in western Europe. Foregrounding the exceptional powers of the sovereign that would inform the political theory resonate in the later work of Bodin and Hobbes, the Gest laments the dwindling regional autonomy of the North, with its once-great barons, and the increasing pull of law and authority to London and Westminster.

Contrary to earlier pessimistic predictions, the COVID-19 pandemic has not reinforced the popularity of populism. Authoritarian populism, with its charateristic distrust in scientific knowledge, excessive centralization and conspiratorial obsessions, as well as its unwillingness to participate in supranational efforts, has not turned out to be more efficient in handling the crisis than liberal democratic counterparts. Transparency and decentralization, characteristic of liberal democracies, were central to effective pandemic responses. Populists in power view the pandemic as a public relations challenge rather than a public health problem, and act accordingly.

Chapter 5 opens for Part II of the book with the task of taxonomy, classifying the emergent post-crisis EU fiscal architecture from the perspective of fiscal federalism theory in order to determine what it demands from the EU legal order to ‘work’. Chapter 5 finds that, from the perspective of fiscal federalism theory, the EU has sunk the cornerstones of a highly centralized model of ‘proto-fiscal union’ that is far more apt to unitary states than any of the other federations touched upon in this book. At its core, the new model supplants a legal pillar of fiscal sovereignty and market discipline (an entrenched ‘no-bailout’ law) with a legal feature of unitary states: centralized financial assistance and legal governance of fiscal policy. Chapter 5 evaluates the demands this places on the European legal order, and provides directions for the remainder of the analysis of Part II.

This chapter argues that one of the longest-surviving forms of local, indirect administration that actually predated the Ottomans were the Kurdish emirates. In most parts of the empire, the Ottomans, like the European governments, for example, relied on a system of indirect rule whereby the local magnates recognized the ruler’s suzerainty. The rise of the modern state and the expansion of its institutions diminished the need for what might be called a symbiotic relationship between the imperial centre and the peripheral power-holders like the Kurdish aristocracy. This practice of ending local autonomies, whereby central states abandoned their ‘confederal organization’ during widespread civil wars, allowed them to replace decentralized structures of politics with administratively and territorially cohesive regimes (Maier, 2006: 43). In Ottoman Kurdistan, the process of centralization and replacing the indirect rule of the Kurdish aristocracy with the direct rule of the government appointees was made possible by a parallel development: the making of the Ottoman-Iranian boundaries and the permanent division of Kurdistan that has been evolving for quite some time. The elimination of Kurdish dynasts, who hitherto held power at the borderland, facilitated the making of the boundary even as the making of the boundary facilitated their elimination.

This chapter traces the formation of the first imperial polities on Chinese soil — the Qin and Han dynasties. It starts with the exploration of how the disintegration of the Zhou dynasty (c.1046–255 BCE) triggered the quest for political unity of “All-under-Heaven” as the only means of stemming the ongoing bloodshed and turmoil. This common quest legitimated the unified empire with universalistic pretensions generations before the real unification occurred (in 221 BCE). The first imperial polity, Qin, was highly centralized and committed to territorial expansion. It turned out, however, that this model was unsustainable in the long term. The subsequent Han dynasty experimented with various degrees of expansion and retrenchment, in the process of which a new modus vivendi was reached: the universal superiority of China’s emperor had to be maintained primarily on a symbolic level, whereas in practice, the “inner” and “outer” realm became fully delineated.

The Introduction to our volume starts by delineating changing attitudes towards the word “empire” in Western scholarship from the 20th to the 21st century. It then explains our concept of an empire as an entity with strongly pronounced aspirations to attain universal rule and with clear hegemonic position in its macro-region. We continue with a brief outline of the three waves of the empires’ formation in five Eurasian macro-regions (Near East, South Asia, Europe, East Asia, and the Inner Asian steppe belt). The second half of the Introduction deals with the factors that influenced spatial dimensions of Eurasian empires — from ideological and religious commitment to attaining universal rule to a variety of ecological, military, economic, and administrative considerations that prevented the empires’ leaders from realizing this goal. The multiplicity of these factors suffices to caution against any attempt to create a neat uniform scheme that would explain the empires’ expansion and contraction.

The great budgetary transformation of central Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union demonstrates the critical importance of economic context, political culture, history, and institutions in the recreation of public financial management systems. Since the collapse of the USSR, countries in this region have served as fiscal laboratories that experiment with budgetary reforms. This includes countries like Hungary and Poland that joined the European Union.

Latin America has stignificantly improved its budgetary effectiveness during the past thirty years, despite a widespread variation in political, demographic, and income levels. Bureaucratic authoritarian regimes have evolved into contribute to public finance stabilization. Significant problems remain in the financing of such basic services as education and health care. Expenditure control weakenesses remain at the managerial and operational levels of government.

This is the main theory chapter. It develops a new typology of public service reforms: vertical dimension of centralization and horizontal dimension of public versus mixed governance. The chapter analyzes the preferences of different political parties and the Church, and it sets out the methodology and chapter structure.

In some polities the exercise of political power is highly concentrated, and in others it is widely dispersed. In Chapter 11, we examine the effects of scale on power concentration, arguing that the degree of horizontal and vertical concentration of power in a polity is affected by the number of people residing within that polity. The larger the polity, the more fragmented its institutional design is likely to be. This is a function of (1) increased heterogeneity, which entails that larger communities are difficult to govern in a concentrated fashion, and (2) lower levels of trust, which call for institutional constraints on the center that cannot be easily overcome. To tackle this vast subject we adopt a variety of country-level indicators of power concentration including subnational regions, federalism, bicameralism, revenue decentralization, capital city size, and checks and balances. We also probe a variety of subnational indicators focused on variation across states and localities within the United States. Most of these analyses support the contention that scale is associated with deconcentrated power.

Hierarchization is a deliberate process to create a vertically nested governance architecture where actors and institutions in a lower rank are bound or otherwise compelled to obey, respond to or contribute to higher-order norms and objectives. Drawing on this definition, we review recent research on hierarchization in earth system governance and the political and legal processes that establish, maintain and legitimize it. Here we present three mutually non-exclusive forms of hierarchization – systematization, centralization and prioritization. Each involves different actors and rationales, mechanisms and strategies, while achieving different purposes with varying governance outcomes. We illustrate our argument with empirical examples including the proposed Global Pact for the Environment, the proposal to establish a world environment organization and the Sustainable Development Goals. We conclude with an assessment of the benefits and drawbacks of hierarchization as an approach to some of the challenges inherent in earth system governance, and offer suggestions for future research.

"Theories of niche construction and near-decomposability, which correspond to competition and decentralization in economic parlance, illuminate how respective networks of authority served parochial purposes, with motivations related to specific challenges: in China, to rule a large territory, and in Europe, to enhance the competitive power of small states in a fragmented landscape. A shift toward outward expansion made European elites less parochial and resulted in an explosive wave of innovation. China’s centralized network enabled periods of unmatched stability and prosperity; but the merit-based bureaucracy stifled innovation, preventing the rise of a merchant class, an independent private sector, and outward expansion, all of which were associated with Europe’s industrialization. China’s inward gaze ensured the paramount political power of bureaucratic elites, resulting in systemic corruption that grew extensively over time, impoverishing the peasantry and causing rebellions, chaos, and conflict – a process that repeated itself throughout China’s history.