ABSTRACT
The structure of government – the allocation of authority across generalpurpose jurisdictions – is perceived to affect political participation, accountability, ethnic and territorial conflict, policy innovation, corruption, government spending, democratic stability, and the incidence of human rights abuse. It has proved easier to formulate hypotheses concerning these and other effects of government structure than to test their validity. Most empirical studies use quite sophisticated, often direct, measures for the phenomena that are said to be affected by government structure (e.g. conflict, participation, government spending), but rudimentary, often indirect, measures for government structure itself.
