Taking the policy network approach, this chapter investigates three mechanisms – policy agenda, power concentration and heterogeneity dependence – underlying the evolution of inter-government agency relations in China. Operationally, the chapter adopts a social network analysis-based method to quantitatively study China’s innovation policy network. The findings show that the formal policy network for innovation has not only sustained through the intervention of policy agenda but also self-organized because of policy network’s nature of power concentration and heterogeneity dependence. The presence of such mixed mechanisms in the evolution of China’s innovation policy network differs from the findings from industrialized countries where self-organization plays a central role. The findings advance our theoretical understanding of the evolution of innovation policy network and have implications for policymaking in emerging economies.

This chapter compares the processes through which the constitutions of Colombia and Venezuela where rewritten during the 1990s. It argues that participatory constitutional redrafting, such as the one which took place in these two countries, generally results in constitutions that widen democracy through the introduction of novel participatory mechanisms and expansive bills of rights, allowing for the inclusion of new actors, interests and demands. However, the internal dynamics of negotiation between the drafters will determine whether the resulting text also creates institutional architectures that are favorable to competition, dissent and accountability. In cases such as Colombia, where a variety of political forces present in constitutional assemblies participate in a centripetal dynamic of negotiation and bargaining, the process often results in a consensual and balanced constitutional text that disperses power. By contrast, cases such as Venezuela, where there is a dominant force or coalition that does not need to engage in negotiations with other actors present in the assembly, tend to produce institutional arrangements that concentrate power in the executive at the expense of those institutions that place limits on the use of power thereby reducing opportunities for dissent and the possibility of accountable governments.

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.