Critical Review Of Gerring And Thackers Centripetal Theory Of Democratic Governance

In this essay it is proposed a critical analysis of Gerring and Thacker’s Centripetal Theory of Democratic Governance (2008). There is a fundamental ambiguity concerning the association between the name of the theory – “Centripetalism”, according to the authors a mix of authority and inclusion – and its substantial and practical contents. It will be debated Gerring and Thacker’s claim to have conceived a “refinement of Lijphart’s consensus model”; in fact the centripetal theory is actually incompatible with Lijphart’s power sharing model and, in many respects, the opposite. It will also be presented a critic of Gerring and Thacker’s methodology for what concerns causal mechanisms and aggregation of variables at the basis of the empirical verification of the theory, showing why their centripetal theory of democratic governance can be considered too far-reaching (but even too less characterized by its own peculiar traits) to have a real explanatory power.