The systematic study of politics inevitably wrestles with definitions of fundamental concepts and their operationalization and measurement. “Slippery concepts” such as power, control, influence, interests, representation, and corruption are core to politics and governance and the study of them. Even when widely accepted as precisely defined, efforts to measure empirically such essential concepts are inevitably challenged. Critical questions about validity, reliability, and precision, for example, are inescapably raised about every rigorous measure of political and social phenomenon worthy of investigation. And, when mollified, additional, and equally insatiable, epistemological hurdles are raised. Robust measures in comparative political analysis frequently still get caught in the tug-of-war between those who want such measures to capture such phenomena well enough to be rigorously applied cross-nationally and regional or country specialists who want to apply them to individual political systems or selected regions of the world. The former emphasize scientific generalizations while the latter consider contextual details and idiosyncrasies in specific cases. Measuring Regional Authority provides a welcome piece of scholarship on how such tensions in comparative political analysis might best be balanced. By providing a robust comparative measure of within-state regional authority, this book will significantly benefit exploration of meso-governments and the causes and consequences of variation in their authority.
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Thomas D. Lancaster (2017) studied this question.