The Republic of France is in many ways the archetype of the centralized, unitary state, and its political institutions contrast sharply with those of the federations of India and the United States. Following the Revolution of 1789, the new republic undertook a series of political reforms intended to strip power from the landed nobility and vest it instead with a new set of egalitarian institutions, the basis of which was both centralization and uniformity. The revolutionaries believed that “justice requires the republic to be one and indivisible” (Berger 1974, 8). Inherent to this new model was a concentration of political authority, as well as political, legislative, and judicial powers, in the hands of the central government. In contrast to more decentralized and federal political systems, the French system is intended to tightly bind officials at both central and local levels and to minimize conflicts between them. Consequently, a defining feature of French political institutions is the relative cohesion of elite decision-making. According to one prominent observer, France “provides the prime example of a highly coherent administration, whereas the United States and Switzerland constitute the typical cases of lack of such coherence” (Kriesi 1995, 171). However, during the past thirty years even the French state has become more decentralized, and powers and responsibilities for some policy areas, including water resource management, have been devolved to regional governments. In comparative perspective, the outstanding feature of the French political system is in fact the presence of strong regional governance organizations, including several organized around river basin boundaries, that are among the world’s most successful interjurisdictional management institutions. France’s system of river basin governance organizations, called “water agencies” (agences de l’eau), is by many accounts the most collaborative and participatory in the world. A global survey of river basin governance institutions concludes, for example, that the French system “is remarkable for its longevity, in how it tries to formalize representation . . . and perhaps most important, how it has attempted local and decentralized water management within the centralist state tradition in France” (Delli Priscoli 2007, 17).
Political Institutions and Policy Choices: Evidence from the United States
