Devolution Best Practices

British commentators on infrastructure have spoken about overcentralization in their country, often also related to other state capacity issues. This led to a false belief that the United Kingdom (or just England) is too centralized, and to a discourse on devolution that I think doesn’t really get what the success and failure cases are. Beyond very small states like Israel and Singapore, we see extensive devolution of the management certain functions, like health, education, and local public transport, but not others, like intercity infrastructure, social insurance, and most taxes. Germany and Canada both have thriving Land- or province-level politics through having large enough units that democratic elections can be meaningful, and through devolving many functions to the same level that those elections are in fact meaningful. The United States suffers from a severe local democratic deficit because of wrong scale and because each function is devolved to a different level so elections…