Final Report Summary - MLG (Causes and Consequences of Multilevel Governance) The purpose of this project is to estimate and explain the spread of multilevel governance within and beyond Europe from 1950 to 2010. What is the scope and depth of authority exercised by intermediate or governments in 81 countries? What is the scope and depth of authority exercised by 72 international governmental organizations (IGOs)? Major theories of the causes and consequences of government structure are examined against new, systematic and refined measures of multilevel governance. The research programme has four parts: a) the creation of reliable estimates for the scope and depth of authority exercised by subnational and international governments, annually for 1950 to 2010; b) investigation of the causes of variation in government structure; c) evaluation of the effect of multilevel governance on the quality of policy, politics, and polity (consequences); and d) development of a general theory of the structure of multilevel government. The output is five books to be published by Oxford University Press, in addition to publicly available datasets, and a series of articles and book chapters in peer-reviewed outlets.
