Contributions of the postfunctionalist theory of governance to subnational research in comparative politics

This symposium Regional Authority and the Postfunctionalist Theory of Governance engages two recent books on regional governance. The first sets out a measure of regional authority for 81 countries in North America, Europe, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific between 1950 and 2010. The second theorizes how regional governance is shaped by functional and communal pressures. These pressures are detected in many historical episodes of jurisdictional reform. These books seek to pin them down empirically. Community and efficiency appear to have tangible and contrasting effects that explain how jurisdictions are designed, why regional governance has become differentiated and how multilevel governance has deepened over the past several decades. The symposium consists of contributions by Kent Eaton, Jean-Paul Faguet and Imke Harbers followed by a response from the authors: Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks, Arjan H. Schakel, Sara Niedzwiecki, Sandra Chapman Osterkatz and Sarah Shair-Rosenfield, Measuring Regional Authority: A Postfunctionalist Theory of Governance, Vol. I. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016; and Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, with Arjan H. Schakel, Sara Niedzwiecki, Sandra Chapman Osterkatz and Sarah Shair-Rosenfield, Community, Scale, and Regional Governance: A Postfunctionalist Theory of Governance, Vol. II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.