In this book I examine the histories of the U.S. government, the Roman Catholic Church, General Motors Corporation (GM), and the European Union (EU) as examples of the evolution of large, lumbering institutions. The book focuses on how each of these political, religious, and commercial systems – all federated in some form or at some point in their histories – centralized authority away from subunits. Amid the many differences in these four institutional cases, I have found similarities in their trajectories and – most importantly for the purposes of this book – similar mechanisms that drove and sustained their centralized authority. The last case examined, the EU, remains somewhat different than the others because it has not yet changed the institutional nature of its executive authority and has not locked into centralization in the same manner as the others. For the remaining three cases, decentralization is difficult or impossible to achieve. The lessons of centralization to be gleaned from this analysis will likely be of most value to those with a stake in the EU’s continued evolution. Monumental issues in governance between subunits and the central unit remain unresolved in the EU. Comparable issues have largely been settled in the other three examples examined in this book.

It is fair to ask why I would compare these gigantic, complicated entities and to wonder whether any substantial conclusions can be drawn from such comparisons. Some might question my intellectual credentials or personal sanity in devoting my time to such research. Furthermore, it is unlikely that there are many scholars who sit awake at night, pondering the governance connections between four such disparate institutions. Some scholars care about general questions of governance in federated institutions, whereas others focus on the broader questions of organizational and institutional design. In attempting to tie such concerns together and draw compelling conclusions, I am entering uncharted social science territory. My purpose here is to provide novel insight into comparative governance, including not only governance of nation-states, but also of organizations and sprawling units like global churches, international political systems, universities, corporations, and consortiums of all types.