A common feature of the Scandinavian political system which had developed by the mid-fourteenth century was the absence of larger political assemblies corresponding to European general estates and English parliaments. The only regular decision-making body alongside the Scandinavian kings was the aristocratic-clerical council of each realm. In 1397, the grand-nephew of Margrethe was crowned king of all three Scandinavian kingdoms in Kalmar. The two documents from the Kalmar meeting of 1397, the Act of Coronation and the Union Document, are the most debated in Scandinavian medieval research. The thirty-five years following the Kalmar meeting have been described as the Nordic union of the Act of Coronation. The union monarchy dominated the three realms beyond the purely local level. Subsequently, the union monarchy met with a crisis in the 1430s which it could not overcome. The chapter also discusses council constitutionalism, the constitutional situation in the period 1450-1513, and the local administration in Denmark, Sweden and Norway.

Managerial work by local elites was accompanied by an outpouring of theoretical writing. The focus in local government had been an important part of the 'Restoration' in the 1860s, when China was faced with widespread chaos and devastation in the wake of the mid-century rebellions. As a movement pledged to social transformation as well as national unification, the Nationalists of the 1920s came to power committed to carrying out Sun Yat-sen's vision of a democratic China. The evolution of the Nationalist government's policy toward local administration embodied a general trend away from Sun's conception of local self-government and toward a more rigorous system of bureaucratic control. Liang Shu-ming's rural reconstruction experiment in Shantung achieved at least a temporary protection by political authorities, and relied on a radically nativist Confucian reformism. Rural reconstruction thus involved a broad range of types: Westerninfluenced and nativist, educational and military, populist and bureaucratic. Predictably, the Nanking authorities became involved in rural reconstruction too.