A centralized (US, Oxford English) or centralised (UK) government is one in which power or legal authority is exerted or coordinated by a de facto political executive to which federal states, local authorities, and smaller units are considered subject. In a national context, centralization occurs in the transfer of power to a typically sovereign nation state.
All constituted governments are, to some degree, necessarily centralized, in the sense that a theoretically federal state exerts an authority or prerogative beyond that of its constituent parts. To the extent that a base unit of society — usually conceived as an individual citizen — vests authority in a larger unit, such as the state or the local community, authority is centralized. The extent to which this ought to occur, and the ways in which centralized government evolves, forms part of social contract theory.
e.g. what is available to consumers and manufacturing organisations is determined through centralization
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“... Washington was not only an important capital. It was a city of fear. Below that glittering and delightful surface there is another story, that of underpaid Government clerks, men and women holding desperately to work that some political pull may at any moment take from them. A city of men in office and clutching that office, and a city of struggle which the country never suspects.”
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