RESEARCH ARTICLE
Political Centralization, Federalism, and Urbanization: Evidence from Australia George Wilkinson III1* , Fiona Haslam McKenzie2 , Julian Bolleter1
and Paula Hooper1
1
The Australian Urban Design Research Centre, University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia and Centre for Regional Development, University of Western Australia, Perth, WA, Australia *Corresponding author: Email: George.WilkinsonIII@research.uwa.edu.au 2
(Received 4 April 2021; revised 1 December 2021; accepted 7 February 2022)
Abstract The dominance of capital cities (urban primacy) is an enduring characteristic of Australian states. There has been limited empirical research examining the drivers of primacy in states despite some being extreme examples of the phenomenon, both in magnitude and scale. In light of institutional theories of settlement patterns, we developed a profile of Australian urbanization using a century of time-series data, descriptive statistics, and an empirical model of city populations. In Australian states high measures of primacy have endured with little evidence of disruption despite the enormous size of these states, their wealth, and population growth – factors associated with declining and low primacy. Statistically, state capital city status has a significant effect on city population size variation, with results suggesting primacy in states is in part a product of Australian federalism. This contrasts with views that suggest Australia’s scarcity of large non-capital cities is due to isolation, low population, and environmental determinism. The findings in this paper have major implications relative to national and/or state strategies that aim to decentralize population away from the primate cities. Keywords: urban primacy; cities; urbanization; Australia; federalism
Introduction In the spring of 2016, Social Science History featured a comparative analysis of Canadian and American urbanization (Kim and Law 2016) to which we respond with a similarly designed study of Australia. Grounded in institutional economics, Kim and Law’s study joined an emergent literature which poses that institutions sculpt economic geography through their control of resource allocation (Samuels 1995; Acemoglu et al. 2001). Contrary to neoclassical economics, where markets are singular drivers of the economy, institutional economics emphasize “the rules of the game” (North 1990: 3), the foundational, formal and informal constraints on
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Social Science History Association.
https://doi.org/10.1017/ssh.2022.30 Published online by Cambridge University Press
Social Science History (2023), 47, 11–39 doi:10.1017/ssh.2022.30