ABSTRACT
Decentralization is a curious policy for a central government to pursue. After all, if politics is essentially about the struggle for power, why would anyone or any group want to give away the power that was struggled for and won? Indeed, “on the actual historical record, political decentralization (as distinct from administrative decentralization) is extremely rare, except perhaps in moments of constitutional upheaval and revolution” (Leonardi et al. 1981: 95), as Robert Putnam and his fellow researchers of Italian regionalization once observed.
