Research :: Work in Progress
Focus
ERC PROJECT: CAUSES AND CONSEQUENCES OF MULTILEVEL GOVERNANCE
Funded by the European Research Council (#249543), Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks are leading an international team of young scholars seeking to understand why the territorial structure of government varies. Our premise (or hard core) is that the structure of government is shaped by scale and community. Government is a means to achieve collective benefits. Larger jurisdictions can provide pure public goods at lower cost, and they can internalize policy consequences over a larger population. But government is also an expression of community. Citizens care—passionately—about who exercises authority over them. The dilemma of governance is that the functional need for human co-operation to provide public goods only rarely coincides with the territorial scope of community.
Communities face in two directions. Communities engender group solidarity which, as the ancient Greeks understood, facilitates public goods provision. Humans have a capacity for altruism that can lead them to risk death to defend 
their families and their communities. But communities are also parochial. They differentiate and distance themselves from outsiders and resist rule that they regard as foreign. Hence collective problems generate a demand for governance, but the supply is constrained by parochial altruism. The challenge permeates governance from the local to the global. Within the state the challenge is to gain the benefits of scale while adjusting governance to communities smaller than the country. Above the state it is to gain the benefits of scale while adjusting to weak transnational community. The goal of the project is to map and explain how scale and community shape governance within and above the state. If you would like to read more, click here for the project website.
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Gary Marks (2012). Europe and its Empires: From Rome to the European Union. Journal of Common Market Studies, 50 (1).
Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks (2011). Beyond Federalism: Estimating and Explaining the Territorial Structure of Government. Under review.
Sandra Chapman (2010). Multilevel Governance in Latin America: Challenges and Opportunities in Conceptualization and Measurement, paper presented at the Latin American Studies Association, Toronto.
Further work in progress/ recent work
Liesbet Hooghe (2012). Images of Europe: How Commission Officials View their Institution’s Role in the EU, Journal of Common Market Studies, 50 (1): 88-111. Replication data in SPSS and STATA
Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks (2011). The Evolution of Sid Tarrow: Becoming a Transnational Scholar, paper prepared for Sid Tarrow’s fest, June 2011, unpublished.