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In the light of the UK's impending referendum on membership of the European Union, I've been reading a bit about the distribution of powers in a layered political system. Various regions of the UK have rejected elected assemblies, while London, Scotland and Wales seemed to fairly enthusiastically embraced theirs. A lot of the debate seems to relate to different groups arguing over whether different layers (for us it goes from parish councils, to district, county, sometimes a regional assembly, national parliament, EU then in some ways the UN) can make useful decisions for their area of influence or will just be "talking shops".

Is there an analysis anywhere of how existing multilayered systems share their powers and, more speculatively, what an efficient distribution from the most local to the most global might be?

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    Hi Iain. This is a very interesting question. But I'm afraid it is rather broad. Most countries present a multilayer culture, but the repartition of responsibilities differ considerably. So it is hard to analyse in general terms.
    – clem steredenn
    Apr 9 '16 at 19:50
  • I suppose an analysis of any examples would be interesting to see. It all seems maddeningly opaque in the UK at present.
    – Iain Hallam
    Apr 10 '16 at 0:11
  • As an engineer I believe the most efficient distribution would be strategies broken down to substrategies of the most local layer. Then these strategical items could be implemented by local operatives (executed by disjoint government offices and agencies). Higher levels should only coordinate, harmonize and moderate the lower levels. I believe in complete devolution with government offices and agencies providing service share regarding strategies with overlapping operatives.
    – András Hummer
    Dec 3 '16 at 18:52