Decentralization and Popular Democracy: Governance from Below in Bolivia has been awarded the W.J.M. Mackenzie Book Prize for the best book published in political science in 2012.  It was the unanimous choice of a distinguished jury, who said of the book:

“This book is an outstanding and exemplary piece of research that teaches us how properly devolving power and money leads local government to be more responsive to local interests. The book makes both a major theoretical contribution regarding the impacts of federalism and decentralisation, and conducts a thorough evaluation of a major programme of decentralisation in Bolivia. The theories driven by a clear and sensible intuition that decentralisation should lead to diversity between local authorities because of different local political pressures. This is fully developed in a formal rational choice model. The empirical analysis is a rare combination of both excellent quantitative and qualitative analysis, involving a mixture of econometric analysis of local government spending over time and thorough ethnographic fieldwork on the workings of local government in various districts. The fieldwork is particularly striking for the effort involved in studying difficult to reach places and in revisiting locations ten years apart, before and after the decentralisation. The research is all the more effective for such a breath of method and thorough analysis.”

A paperback version was just released by the University of Michigan Press (August 2013).

Early reviews are available in Comparative Political Studies and Publius.

Further information on this and related books, articles and research projects, including datasets, research tools, teaching aids, and other resources available at the Governance from Below website.