ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out a coding scheme for regional authority in 42 developed countries for the period 1950-2006 and applies the scheme to cases that raise coding issues.
Two challenges confront a researcher who wishes to measure regional authority. The first is to navigate from the abstract to the particular. Despite its centrality to political science, authority is an abstract quality that cannot be measured directly. The art of measurement is to disaggregate the abstract concept in such a way that variation on each of its parts (or dimensions) can be reliably evaluated, while sustaining the meaning of the concept. Each step along the way – breaking the concept down into domains, summarizing each domain in a limited number of dimensions, operationalizing the dimensions as rating scales, and, finally, coding cases on these scales – is a step from the abstract to the particular.
