Federalism and Party Behavior in Australia and Canada

Abstract

M UCH of the work on federalism by political scientists has focused on the legal distribution of powers between the central and constituent governments. Wheare's definition of federalism,1 like most other definitions,2 focuses on the spheres of power of each level of government. However, any effort to think of federalism in terms of spheres of power runs into difficulty when applied to empirical phenomena; particular activities usually do not confine themselves to a single category of power in any analytic classification scheme. Therefore, for the purposes of this study a federal system is one that fulfills the following conditions: national and constituent units of government rule over the same territory and the existence of both levels of government is guaranteed by a fundamental written law.3 Political scientists are increasingly cognizant of the fact that the characteristics of each political system are a function of their cultural and economic milieu. Federal systems are no exception.4 Thus, one may, for analytical purposes, conceive of two alternative paradigms of federal systems based on the relationships between the legal institutions of federalism and their economic and cultural milieu. On the one hand, the legal institutions of federalism may be congruent with a cultural or economic environment reflecting real or perceived geographically defined diversities. This paradigm may conveniently be referred to as a congruent federal system. On the other hand, the legal forms of federalism are sometimes imposed on societies in which the diversities are not geographically defined. Such a society may be called relatively homogeneous for the purposes of this study and such a federal system may conveniently be referred to as a formalistic federal system. These paradigms provide a convenient framework for an analysis of the function of parties as integrative institutions in federal systems. Federalism can be expected to have a negative effect on the ability of parties to perform the aggregation function. Federalism, after all, presumes representation of parochial sub-systems in the national decision-making process.5 Clearly, this negative effect should be more pronounced in an empirical manifestation of the congruent paradigm than in one of the formalistic paradigm. A