National and regional elites in search of a compromise? Reforming regional administrative-territorial division as a problem of multilevel politics

One of the key institutional dimensions of multilevel politics is the administrative-territorial division of the state (ATD), including its “fragmentation”, i.e. the size and number of administrative-territorial units (ATUs). Two theoretical traditions have been developed in understanding the processes of ATD reforms. The first emphasizes the central government’s intention for administrative effectiveness (“administrative motivation”), while the second focuses on the interactions between national and subnational elites pursuing their own interests (“regionalist motivation”). From this perspective, the article examines the reforms of regional ATD. Based on information from various sources, all the reforms of regional ATD in 146 countries over the past three decades have been systematized and analyzed from the view of five possible scenarios. The most common scenario is the creation of new regional ATUs within the existing ATD, while the scenarios of radical reforms aimed at either eliminating the regional level or creating it are the least common. The study demonstrates that in all five scenarios there are both the cases, where the “administrative motivation” dominates (France, Denmark, Malaysia, etc.), and the reforms caused by the “regionalist motivation”, when the goal is to satisfy the interests of regional elites (India, Canada, Ethiopia, etc.) or, conversely, to weaken regionalist movements (Laos, Pakistan, etc.). Some statistical tests indirectly indicate that both motivations occur not only in individual empirical cases, but can be considered as general trends for the countries of the world as a whole.