Is there any academic consensus regarding the effects of decentralizing the departments of a federal government from the capital to the provinces/states? For example, is there a consistent effect on corruption or the workforce of the civil service?

by Ask-about-my-mtDNA

There are several notable examples in modern history of federated republics that maintain every department of the government and civil service in the capital. An obvious example of this is Washington DC, USA. Washington houses the Dept of Defense, Dept of State, etc. in its local metro area with only the recent exception of the Dept. of Agriculture, which began to move to the Midwest USA in 2019. On the other hand, as of the 1980s Canada has decentralized their federal government to the provinces. Is there any scholarship around the effects of centralization/decentralization, particularly with regards to this pair in the latter part of the 20th century?

Makgraf

What are you referring to regarding Canada decentralizing their federal government to the provinces in the 1980s? Canada is a federation, with some powers held by the federal government and others by the provinces. All of the federal departments are headquartered in Ottawa, the Canadian capital. Just like the US, Canada has sub-offices across the country. But the Minister (the member of the Canadian parliament who is in charge of the department), the Deputy Minister (the top civil servant for the department) and all of high-level staff are based out of Ottawa (and, for what it's worth, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is still headquartered in Washington D.C.).