A Centripetal Theory of Democratic Governance

John Gerring (PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 1993) is Professor of Political Science at Boston University, where he teaches courses on methodology and comparative politics. His books include Party Ideologies in America, 1828–1996 (Cambridge University Press, 1998), Social Science Methodology: A Criterial Framework (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Case Study Research: Principles and Practices (Cambridge University Press, 2007), Concepts and Method: Giovanni Sartori and his Legacy (Routledge, 2009), Social Science Methodology: Tasks, Strategies, and Criteria (Cambridge University Press, 2011), Global Justice: A Prioritarian Manifesto (in process), and Democracy and Development: A Historical Perspective (in process). He served as a fellow of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ), as a member of The National Academy of Sciences' Committee on the Evaluation of USAID Programs to Support the Development of Democracy, as President of the American Political Science Association's Organized Section on Qualitative and Multi-Method Research, and is the current recipient of a grant from the National Science Foundation to collect historical data related to colonialism and long-term development.

“This is an ambitious project, which asks how the design of democratic institutions affects downstream indicators of government performance, such as corruption, quality of bureaucracy, political stability, rule of law, protection of civil liberties, the capacity to tax, the provision of infrastructure, public health, illiteracy, trade protectionism, and more. Gerring and Thacker advance the controversial argument that institutions that centralize political authority outperform those that decentralize power. Scholars of comparative politics and would-be political reformers alike should take note of this important piece of work.” -John Carey, Dartmouth College

• 1. Models of governance; Part I. Causal Mechanisms: 2. Party government; 3. Conflict mediation; 4. Policy coordination; Part II. Empirics: 5. Hypotheses; 6. Crossnational tests; 7. Assessing the evidence; Part III. Conclusions: 8. In defense of grand theory; Appendix A. Defining good governance; Appendix B. Alternative theories revisited; Sources.