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Segnungen von Foederalismus   Author Info    • Schneider, Andrea
(Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg)    • Zimmermann, Klaus W.
(Helmut Schmidt University, Hamburg)   The political blessings
of federalism are the core of our discussion. These benefits are
operationalized as the decrease in the number of outvoted in a
federal system with majority voting as an important source of
regime satisfaction. The approach originates from the work of
Roland Pennock who developed a similar methodology exactly 50
years ago although he applied it to a slightly different topic.
First, we show that decentralized decision-making is
advantageous in the majority of logical cases since the expected
value of the number of outvoted is lower compared to centralized
decision-making. Comparing different cases, we conclude that the
political force of the decentralization-theorem (Oates) is a
sole and inverse function of the population size of the nation,
implying that th