Abstract
Under what conditions are ‘holding-together’ federations created? And what shapes the development of their territorial structures? This article answers these questions through a comparative-historical analysis of territorial restructuring in Belgium, Spain and the UK. It shows that ‘holding-together’ federations are created during a critical juncture opened by a surge of regional nationalism and that the strategic responses of mainstream parties to this threat are conditioned by their ideology. These constitutional settlements put countries on a path of institutional development that is conditioned by mainstream parties’ ideational adaptation to the political foundations of the federation and by their power in the system of inter-governmental relations. Even when regionalist parties regain control of the agenda, mainstream parties’ ideological adherence to the norms enshrined in the constitutions, coupled with their resilient power in the system of inter-governmental relations, means that institutional change is gradual. These insights bear relevance for institutional theory and for comparative federalism.
Highlights
Even after decades of decentralization, the break-up of multinational democracies is still on the cards, prompting responses from mainstream parties in central governments
At a time when scholars are studying the origins of federal systems (Ziblatt 2006), the relationship between territorial cleavages and federalism (Amoretti and Bermeo 2004), the sources of federal stability (Bednar 2009) or ‘authority migration’ (Gerber and Kollman 2004), and the processes of constitutional change (Behnke and Benz 2009; Benz and Colino 2011), the study of decentralization in multinational democracies offers a way to investigate two questions: Under what conditions are ‘holding-together’ federations created? What shapes the development of their territorial structures?
This literature has the merit of overcoming the unproductive division between work that adopts either a long-run structural perspective (Erk 2007; Erk and Koning 2010) or a short-run actor-based perspective (Filipov et al 2004) to explain institutional change. It shows how structural factors, like the relative power of central and state government, influence institutional choice during critical episodes such as state formation processes in Europe (Ziblatt 2006) or economic liberalization in Latin America (Faletti 2010). This literature traces the long-run influence of decisions taken at the founding origins of federations by showing, for example, how the variable adherence to constitutional norms by political actors led to consensus in Germany but conflict in Canada (Broschek 2010) or how the differences in the institutionalization of state governments in the U.S and India influenced their subsequent ability to incorporate new territories (Tillin 2015)
Summary
Territorial restructuring consists of the accumulation of territorial reforms that bring about the gradual ‘re-bundling’ of authority to the regional level over the long-run (Ansell 2004). It encompasses two ‘layers’: (i) an institutional layer that defines the jurisdictional allocation of authority; and (ii) an ideational layer that incarnates a particular federal ‘vision’ (Nicolaidis and Howse 2001) of the legitimate number and relative authority of constituent units. ‘Layering’ describes the “partial renegotiation of some elements of a given institution, while others remain in place” (Thelen 2003, 225) and occurs when there are both agents of change pursuing innovations and constraints on imposed by the institutional context and the presence of veto points (Mahoney and Thelen 2010, 28-9) This is characteristic of territorial reforms, since a constitution is a ‘sticky’ institution, the continuity of which is protected by the thresholds for ratifying amendments and the status quo bias of veto players. A stylized feature of territorial restructuring is that mainstream parties decentralize policy and administrative responsibilities before financial authority, as this enables them to maintain oversight over regional governments’ activity (cf Falleti 2010; Rodrigues-Pose and Gill 2003) It develops sequentially during three ‘moments, each of which corresponds to a distinct developmental trajectory and constitutes the turning points in the periodization strategy used for structuring the comparative-historical analysis (Lieberman 2001).
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