page_title: Yankee Leviathan
section_title: Structural design
hierarchical_section_title: Yankee Leviathan / Synopsis / Comparison of Union and Confederate states / Theoretical framework / Structural design
caption_attribution_description: English: Richard Franklin Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877. Cambridge University Press, 1991. (Fig 3.1). The directionality of the arrows denotes degree of "statist-ness."
context_page_description: Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859-1877 is a book written by Richard Bensel published by Cambridge University Press in 1991. In the book, Bensel undertakes an analysis of the causes of the American Civil War and the failed policies of Reconstruction to construct an argument about the rise of the American national state. The book is a contribution to scholarship on American Political Development and political and economic modernization.
context_section_description: There are two dimensions of structural design: centralization of authority and administrative capacity. Centralization of authority refers to measures which concentrate decision-making power in any of the central state institutions, while administrative capacity concerns the distribution of decision-making power between the central state institutions themselves.
  The state has a higher degree of centralized authority to the extent that it is able to shift discretion to itself from subordinate governments such as states, counties, and municipalities; and also to the extent that it encroaches on the private sphere and civil society.
  The state has higher administrative capacity the more decision-making power is concentrated in central state institutions insulated from political, partisan, and popular influence. Bensel roughly ranks these institutions' adherence to statist principles in descending order as follows: state bureaucracy, national courts, presidency, congress.
caption: Dimensions of structural design of states
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