A detailed examination of federalism and public opinion in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States.
To what extent do federal systems promote multiple identities and attachments? How do their identities affect the trust that is assigned to various orders of government and contribute to cohesion in federalist systems? Do cohesive federations depend on public trust and strong attachment to the national or central government? Are attachments and identification with the various orders of government in conflict or are they compatible?
Identities, Trust, and Cohesion in Federal Systems offers eight comparative essays that provide key insights into identity debates in federalist countries. The findings are drawn from extensive analyses of public opinion data in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Mexico, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. The editors seek to improve our understanding of how identity, trust, and cohesion correlate with centralized, decentralized, and asymmetrical models of federalism in order to gain insight into the diverse governance challenges that various nations encounter.
Making effective use of empirical data to draw evidence-based conclusions about federalist governance, Identities, Trust, and Cohesion in Federal Systems breaks new ground in public policy studies.
Radical Politics and Governance in India’s North East – The Case of Tripura.
Politics and Governance in Indian States – Bihar, West Bengal and Tripura.
Understanding India’s politics and governance requires an examination of how politics and governance occur in the regional States, which constitute the federal units of India.
This book addresses the issues of federalism, power-sharing and constitutional reforms, and their effects on governance in Indian States. Located within the growing literature on new State politics in India, this volume presents a critical, in-depth analysis of politics in Bihar, West Bengal and Tripura — these States being units of analysis for more general implications.
What common obstacles have impeded development in each State, and what factors have favored recent, rapid development in some States but not others? The issues of caste conflicts, ethnic conflicts and other collective identity issues will be examined in this book — a pioneer volume with detailed, empirically-based research on the implications of State-centric politics in India.
The Road to Federalism in Nepal, Myanmar, and Sri Lanka – Finding the Middle Ground.
Since 1950, devolution reforms have been widespread across Western Europe, leading to constitutional transformation in Belgium, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom, as well as the potential for state breakup, as witnessed by independence referendums in Scotland and Catalonia. Over the same period, European integration has transferred power upwards to what is now the European Union. The simultaneous occurrence of these seemingly contradictory trends raises fundamental questions. Is state restructuring a uniform process? Has it been fuelled by European integration and, if so, how?
Restructuring the European State uses a comparative analysis to present a systematic investigation of the connections between European integration and state restructuring. Paolo Dardanelli argues that there are two distinct dynamics of state restructuring: “bottom up,” where one or more regions demand self-government; and “top down,” where the central government decides to devolve power. Through quantitative analyses of thirteen key phases of state restructuring in Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom he shows that European integration has a powerful influence only in bottom up cases. Dardanelli points to a striking paradox of integration, whereby an ethos of Europe growing ever closer to union has become associated with fragmentation, divergence, and increased complexity, rather than a seamless system of multilevel governance.
Innovative and rigorously researched, Restructuring the European State marks a major advance in our understanding of contemporary European politics.
Courts in Federal Countries – Federalists or Unitarists?
The volume’s contributors analyse the centralizing or decentralizing forces at play following a court’s ruling on issues such as individual rights, economic affairs, social issues, and other matters. The thirteen substantive chapters have been written to facilitate comparability between the countries. Each chapter outlines a country’s federal system, explains the constitutional and institutional status of the court system, and discusses the high court’s jurisprudence in light of these features. Courts in Federal Countries offers insightful explanations of judicial behaviour in the world’s leading federations.
The Global Financial Crisis has led to a renewed attention for the management of public debt and deficits of advanced and developing industrial states. To successfully deal with such problems of public finances raises particular concerns in federal states where fiscal competencies are split between two levels of government.
This book offers comparative in-depth knowledge of political struggles related to fiscal consolidation policies in eleven federal states since the 1990s, including the Global Financial Crisis and its aftermath. It identifies conditions that lead to “robust” solutions that can both commit federal actors to prudent fiscal policy-making and avoid conflicts between federal actors that cause federal instability.
This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of political economy and comparative politics in general and comparative federalism and EU Politics in particular.
With the goal of showing the effect of domestic factors on the performance of poverty alleviation strategies in Latin America, Tracy Beck Fenwick explores the origins and rise of conditional cash transfer programs (CCTs) in the region, and then traces the politics and evolution of specific programs in Brazil and Argentina. Utilizing extensive field research and empirical analysis, Fenwick analyzes how federalism affects the ability of a national government to deliver CCTs.
One of Fenwick’s key findings is that broad institutional, structural, and political variables are more important in the success or failure of CCTs than the technical design of programs. Contrary to the mainstream interpretations of Brazilian federalism, her analysis shows that municipalities have contributed to the relative success of Bolsa Familia and its ability to be implemented territory-wide. Avoiding Governors probes the contrast with Argentina, where the structural, political, and fiscal incentives for national-local policy cooperation have not been adequate, at least this far, to sustain a CCT program that is conditional on human capital investments. She thus challenges the virtue of what is considered to be a mainly majoritarian democratic system.
By laying out the key factors that condition whether mayors either promote or undermine national policy objectives, Fenwick concludes that municipalities can either facilitate or block a national government’s ability to deliver targeted social policy goods and to pursue a poverty alleviation strategy. By distinguishing municipalities as separate actors, she presents a dynamic intergovernmental relationship; indeed, she identifies a power struggle between multiple levels of government and their electorates, not just a dichotomously framed two-level game of national versus subnational.
Political parties and civil society organizations are among the most important political actors in federal democracies. These bodies represent both the interests and political identities of people on an individual level; society-wide, they make demands on public institutions and provide support for political preferences. They are also key political actors themselves, functioning as intermediaries between citizens and governments. This fascinating comparative study of the interactions between political parties and civil society in federal systems sheds new light on how these interactions function, influence politics, and ultimately shape a society.
Political parties are known to be vital forces in federal systems. Less well-understood is the role of civil-society institutions; the reason for this in part is that in many less developed federations, political parties may be robust but civil society is weak. Yet there has until now been little comparison of these institutions across federations. By selecting key issues, experts in eleven federal systems consider how these interactions work and how they may be game-changing. Each chapter provides an overview of its country’s arrangements, institutions, and practices regarding political parties and civil society organizations. Chapters reveal how parties and civil society are embedded in an institutional setting as well as the organizational structures and the territorial dynamics of interest mediation. They also analyze the impact of parties and civil society on federal developments.
This clearly written, well-edited collection will be accessible to interested citizens, political leaders, government practitioners, and students and faculty in institutions of higher education. It also provides insight into emerging trends for all these readers. The study concludes, for example, that federalism has proved to be a powerful weapon for opposition parties to challenge one-party hegemony, and that traditional party allegiances is declining across states. Another fascinating insight is new sectors that have been growing in many countries, sectors that focus such issues as citizens’ rights, environmental protection, and gender equality.
A vast majority of nation-states are multinational, multilingual, multireligious, and/or multicultural, and many of these are federations. Understanding the interactions between political bodies within these states helps us understand the twin trends of globalization and regionalization evident throughout today’s world.