Ken Kollman

This book is ambitious. The author strives to analyze and compare four cases of power centralization: American and European government, the Catholic church and General Motors. He builds the comparison on the theory that a strongly positioned leader in a federated system will absorb power and make subsequent decentralization difficult to achieve. The first two chapters, where he discusses various aspects of the theory, is perhaps the best part of the book. I don't think the case studies are equally informative because the compared systems are so different in terms of both timescale and purpose.

The comparison between American federalism and the European Union makes the most sense, but even there the differences outweigh the similarities. As for the remaining two cases, the centralization of the Catholic church over the past 500 years is simply too big a subject for one chapter, while the centralization at General Motors hinges on the personalities of specific executives, which preempts a general analysis. Although the author's general theory of centralization is interesting, I can't say that his exercise in comparative history really supports it. As the author himself admits (page 161), federal systems that failed would not show up as cases to be studied.… (altro)