Federal Systems Research Articles

Nationalism, Regionalism, and Strategic Learning in Federal Systems: Drawing on the Quebec Model in Alberta

ABSTRACT Territorial and intergovernmental tensions are particularly strong in multinational federations like Canada. In this article, we study how Quebec has become an explicit model for Alberta in its own quest for greater autonomy and influence within the Canadian federation. After discussing the notion of strategic learning as it relates to different types of territorial politics (substate nationalism, regionalism, and jurisdictionalism), the article explores three instances of explicit political borrowing from Quebec in contemporary Alberta politics: 1) public statements by provincial leaders advocating increased provincial autonomy; 2) the use of a referendum as a tool to put pressure on the federal government to adopt positions and policies friendly to the Alberta government, as occurred in 2021 with the consultation on equalization; and 3) the development of an Alberta-centered federal party with a secessionist position to bolster the influence of the province in federal politics, as occurred with the Maverick Party.

Whose interests? Which solidarity? Challenges of developing a European Super League

ABSTRACT Since the 1990s, rumours of a European Super League (ESL), comprised of the major clubs from England, France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, have mounted. According to these rumours, this new league would break away from the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA). Many clubs would operate outside the current European federative system, abandoning their national leagues and football federations. An ESL thus conceived would present a menacing alternative to the UEFA Champions League (UCL) and, depending on the format of the ESL, national competitions such as leagues and cups. In this article, we draw on literature in the fields of philosophy and sport law to identify legal and ethical challenges that would result from creating an ESL. Our goal is not to provide exhaustive analyses of the identified challenges. Rather, we aim to examine the challenges to uncover intersections among sport law, sport ethics, and European football.

Fedidchain: An Innovative Blockchain-Enabled Framework for Cross-Border Interoperability and Trust Management in Identity Federation Systems

Fedidchain: An Innovative Blockchain-Enabled Framework for Cross-Border Interoperability and Trust Management in Identity Federation Systems

Exploring the Relationship between Federal Reform and the Representation of the People: The Case of the Belgian House of Representatives

Abstract Federal systems tend to have two venues of representation to ensure that both the people as a whole and the constituent units are represented at the federal level. While this double representation is put forward as a basic (normative) feature of federal systems, little to no empirical research has been conducted on this issue. This contribution therefore studies the representation of the people as a whole and of the constituent units in the Belgian House of Representatives by means of a representative claims analysis of 4,757 oral parliamentary questions. As federal systems tend to be dynamic, the analysis is based on six periods of federal reform through which Belgium decentralized. Our findings show that, over time, the representation of the constituent units increased and exceeded the representation of the people, providing unique empirical input for the debate about the idea that federalism is by definition beneficial for democracy. We problematize our results from a democratic point of view, as—despite being able to vote—the people as a whole are hardly any more represented by the House. Going beyond the Belgian case, we argue that processes of federalization should address the adequate representation of both the constituent units and the people.

Strengthening Academic Medicine's Response to Humanitarian Concerns.

Strengthening Academic Medicine's Response to Humanitarian Concerns.

Challenges toward Evidence-Based Policymaking Using Agent-Based Modeling for Federal Sports Grants: A Self-Reflection from a Transdisciplinary Project

Despite their importance, federal grant systems often need more clarity regarding cost-effectiveness, lack of transparency, and slow feedback cycles. Sports funding systems aimed at improving child health and contributing to sustainable development goals are incredibly challenging due to their heterogeneity in stakeholders and regional aspects. Here, we analyze how we tackled these challenges in a transdisciplinary EU project in Austria, targeting the use of agent-based modeling for evidence-based policymaking in a co-creation process with policy stakeholders in the domain of federal sports grants to improve the health and well-being of children and youth. The initial and executed set of procedures is described, along with lessons learned during the project’s lifetime. These lessons derive a framework that provides an adapted set of processes, supporting methods, and critical decision points for an improved use of transdisciplinarity. In addition, the steps of the developed framework are combined with essential aspects of knowledge integration, following the main phases of the policy cycle and providing suggestions for required skills and competencies for capacity building concerning implementing the developed framework in the public sector. Our results show that the combination of transdisciplinarity, human-centered policymaking, and sports, supported by cutting-edge technologies such as agent-based modeling, can achieve significantly better results than a pure disciplinary approach and generate positive spill-over effects.

The Protection of Human Rights in Federal Systems - The Case of Ethiopia

The Protection of Human Rights in Federal Systems - The Case of Ethiopia

КВАНТИФІКОВАНЕ ТА ЕКСПЕРТНЕ ОЦІНЮВАННЯ ЕФЕКТИВНОСТІ МІЖНАРОДНИХ ФНАНСОВИХ САНКЦІЙ ПРОТИ РФ

Background. The full-scale military aggression of the russian federation against Ukraine has caused significant human, material, and economic losses to Ukraine. Therefore, defeating the aggressor is a task not only for Ukraine but also for the entire world community. In this regard, international economic sanctions should exert pressure and limit russia's financial capabilities to incentivize it to stop a full-scale war. The object of research is international economic relations in the context of financial sanctions, the subject of research is the effectiveness of international financial sanctions against russia. Methods. Generalization, analysis, and synthesis – to formulate the author's definition of the category "international financial sanctions", deduction and induction, abstraction, and concretization – when selecting indicators and their application to characterize the state of development of the financial system of the russian federation, statistical method – to analyze the selected indicators, integration – to develop the author's indicator for assessing the state of the Russian financial market, data extrapolation – to identify trends and forecast changes in the analyzed indicators; methods of economics Results. The author's interpretation of the category "international financial sanctions" is given as restrictive measures for the movement of capital imposed by the government of a particular country (or countries) or an authorized international organization against legal entities and individuals, organized groups of persons of another state to force it to change its current policy or cease certain actions to achieve the goals set by the sanctioners. Quantified and expert assessment of the effectiveness of international sanctions on the financial market of the russian federation was carried out. For the quantified assessment of the effectiveness of anti-russian financial sanctions the author's composite indicator of the state of the financial system of the russian federation, calculated on the basis of such parameters as the assessment by economic entities of the business climate, access to credit, investment activity, the sufficiency of international currency reserves and the number of banking operations. Conclusions. Based on the quantitative and expert assessment, the author reveals the ineffectiveness of certain sanctions and suggests ways to strengthen the impact of the negative sanctions on russia to stop the full-scale aggression against Ukraine, in particular, confiscation of frozen international reserves of the russian federation in favor of Ukraine and payment of reparations; a ban on international transfers via SWIFT for all russian banks; expansion of restrictions for russian companies on international financial transactions and portfolio investment; taxation of dividends received from russian companies and restrictions on the payment of dividends to russian investors; increased pressure on the remaining foreign companies and banks to leave the russian market as soon as possible; companies from developed countries to include information on cooperation with russia in their financial statements; application of stricter secondary sanctions.

РЕГИОНАЛЬНО-МУНИЦИПАЛЬНОЕ ВЗАИМОДЕЙСТВИЕ В СФЕРЕ ИСПОЛЬЗОВАНИЯ ЦИФРОВЫХ ИНСТРУМЕНТОВ ПУБЛИЧНОГО УПРАВЛЕНИЯ

The processes of digital transformation, which are becoming increasingly important in the global economy, are now increasingly active in such spheres as public administration, which are not directly related to production activities. During the first decade of the XXI century, the digitalization of the Russian public administration system primarily consist-ed in the formation of a number of federal information systems, but by the end of the second decade, the regional level began to show increasing dynamics of implementation of digital tools. In the framework of the regional digital transfor-mation, the main difference from the federal one is the presence at the grassroots level of a number of autonomous mu-nicipal organizations that are not subordinate to the regional center and in some cases have their own vision of this pro-cess. Under such conditions, municipal-regional interaction in the field of digital tools of public administration acquires great importance. However, this process is characterized by a low level of formalization and can look like a set of unrelat-ed functional processes, which leads to the lack of comprehensive research in this area. At the same time, the process of regional-municipal interaction, according to the hypothesis of this study, is a complex of interrelated elements based on economic factors, the violation in the practical implementation of each of which contributes to the formation of prerequi-sites for the inefficient use of digital tools. Thus, the purpose of this study is to analyze the structure and composition of the regional-municipal interaction in the framework of the use of digital tools of public administration. On the basis of the goal, the study defined a number of tasks, including the definition of the essence of this interaction, identifying its struc-ture and composition. The study was based on the normative legal acts of public authorities, official digital publications of state and municipal organizations, scientific publications on the digitalization of public administration. According to the results of the study, the basic elements of interaction, their interrelations, and the associated potential risks of disruption of the effective use of digital tools were identified.

Monitoring the use of mineral fertilizers in rural areas of the region

The article reviews the main approaches to the use of fertilizers in agricultural production. A discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of the use of mineral fertilizers in rural areas within the framework of the provisions of sustainable development and the concept of green economy has been revealed. On the example of the Russian Federation and rural territorial economic systems, using monitoring tools, the dependence of wheat yield on the use of mineral and organic fertilizers was studied. The continuing importance of mineral fertilizers in matters of ensuring the food security of the world community has been established.

Secure Multi-party θ-join Algorithms Toward Data Federation

PDF HTML XML Export Cite reminder Secure Multi-party θ-join Algorithms Toward Data Federation DOI: 10.21655/ijsi.1673-7288.00298 Author: Affiliation: Clc Number: Fund Project: Article | Figures | Metrics | Reference | Related | Cited by | Materials | Comments Abstract:Recently, many countries and regions have enacted data security policies, such as the General Data Protection Regulation proposed by the EU. The release of related laws and regulations has aggravated the problem of data silos, which makes it difficult to share data among various data owners. Data federation is a possible solution to this problem. Data federation refers to the calculation of query tasks jointly performed by multiple data owners without original data leaks using privacy computing technologies such as secure multi-party computing. This concept has become a research trend in recent years, and a series of representative systems have been proposed, such as SMCQL and Conclave. However, for the core join queries in the relational database system, the existing data federation system still has the following problems. First of all, the join query type is single, which is difficult to meet the query requirements under complex join conditions. Secondly, the algorithm performance has huge improvement space because the existing systems often call the security tool library directly, which means the runtime and communication overhead is high. Therefore, this paper proposes a join algorithm under data federation to address the above issues. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: firstly, multi-party-oriented federation security operators are designed and implemented, which can support many operations. Secondly, a federated θ-join algorithm and an optimization strategy are proposed to significantly reduce the security computation cost. Finally, the performance of the algorithm proposed in this paper is verified by the benchmark dataset TPC-H. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce the runtime and communication overhead by 61.33% and 95.26%, respectively, compared with the existing data federation systems SMCQL and Conclave. Reference Related Cited by

Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Task Offloading and Resource Allocation for Industrial IoT in MEC Federation System

Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Task Offloading and Resource Allocation for Industrial IoT in MEC Federation System

Federalism, The Law of Nations, and The Excluded Middle

In recent work, Professors Anthony J. Bellia & Bradford R. Clark have argued that the word “State” in the U.S. Constitution should be read in light of certain broadly accepted principles of eighteenth-cen-tury international law, including an interpretive principle that treaties and similar instruments should not be construed to transfer or surren-der sovereign rights absent clear textual language. Professors Bellia & Clark contend that this interpretive principle provides textual support for some of the Supreme Court’s most controversial federalism doc-trines—including state sovereign immunity, the anti-commandeering doctrine, and the equal sovereignty of the States. But not everyone is convinced. In a recent critique of Bellia & Clark’s position, Professor David Schwartz contends that the Founding generation rejected the conception of U.S. States as sovereign entities and that the international law principles to which Bellia & Clark point thus have no relevance to contemporary constitutional debates. This Essay, prepared for a virtual symposium presented by the American Journal of Constitutional History, seeks to steer a middle path between the extremes to which either the theory put forth by Profes-sors Bellia & Clark or the competing theory of Professor Schwartz might be pressed. Evidence from the Revolutionary and Confederation Periods provide ample support for Bellia & Clark’s argument that the presumed sovereign status and rights of the states formed part of the background understanding against which the Constitution would have been understood at the time of its enactment. At the same time, Pro-fessor Schwartz is correct to note that the Constitution of 1787 reflected a clear break with the “pure” treaty model on which the Ar-ticles of Confederation had been premised, rejecting the model of a loose confederation of independent sovereigns in favor of a quasi-na-tional government grounded in the ultimate sovereign authority of the people of the several states. But Professor Schwartz presses his claim too far in arguing that the rejection of the “pure” treaty model should be understood as a complete repudiation of the law-of-nations model as a guide for understanding state-federal relations. The novel, compounded structure of the government established by the federal Constitution, which blended aspects of purely national and purely federal systems in innovative ways, lacked any clear ana-logue in prior international practice, which, in turn, complicates efforts to draw straightforward guidance from preexisting interpretive frame-works endorsed by leading writers on the law of nations. But despite these interpretive challenges, the Essay concludes that law-of-nations principles might nonetheless usefully guide and inform modern under-standings of federalism to at least some degree.

Perspectives on local government’s place in federal systems and central–local relations

To expand on the themes identified by Tomas Hachard’s paper 'Capacity, voice and opportunity: advancing municipal engagement in Canadian federal relations', the Journal commissioned six personal ‘perspectives’ from a diverse group of other Commonwealth countries – Australia, India, New Zealand, Nigeria, South Africa and the United Kingdom (UK). This replicated the model adopted in Issue 26 for Zack Taylor’s paper on 'Regionalism from above: intergovernmental relations in Canadian metropolitan governance'. Similarly, the purpose was to establish a broader picture of issues and trends across the Commonwealth, rather than ‘review’ Hachard’s work.

POSEBNI SUDOVI I AGENCIJE FEDERALNE I DRŽAVNE NADLEŽNOSTI U SJEDINJENIM AMERIČKIM DRŽAVAMA

A large number of courts in the United States have been presented through this paper. One of the main characteristics of both the judicial and the entire legal system of the United States is the division of jurisdiction into federal and state. Given this, there are federal and state judicial systems. However, many special courts and agencies can be found within both federal and state jurisdiction. Federal jurisdiction explains the courts and agencies that have jurisdiction over special types of cases whose jurisdiction extends to the entire territory of the United States. Although there are fifty judicial systems within state jurisdiction in which most courts are similar, there may be one or more country-specific courts. Over 30 courts and agencies from 20 countries located within the United States of America have been processed in this paper. Conclusion is last part of this paper.

The Place of the Local Government in Nigeria’s Federal Arrangement

Multi-level government arrangements-federal, state/provincial and local government-are common to all federal systems. However, the place and role of local government in those systems vary markedly. In some, local government is a constitutionally recognised sphere of government, while in others it is merely a competence of the state/provincial government, or an administrative unit of a higher order of government. In some federal systems where it is recognised, like Nigeria, the local governments are principally established for socio-economic and political development at the grassroots. Thus, local governance is the prerogative of the local governments in Nigeria. This tier of government established by Section 7 of the 1999 constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as amended) has some of its functions detailed in the fourth schedule of the same constitution. The overall objective of this paper is the analysis of the current status of the local government within the Nigerian federal system, and a critical examination of what the future holds for the third tier of government in Nigeria. Using essentially secondary documentary method, with content and thematic analysis, the paper recommends incremental constitutional review (as against mega constitutional renewal), the need to enhance political and economic autonomy of local government through frequent elections, and adopting new strategies for generating internal revenues for the local government in Nigeria.

Redistribution In A Globalized World

Abstract Due to technological change, the opening of borders, and increased economic integration, the financial costs of relocating businesses and factors of production, moving residences, changing jobs, and transporting goods and services across borders pose new challenges for countries and subnational governments seeking to implement redistributive policies. This increasing mobility across borders implies that redistributive policies may amplify interjurisdictional fiscal externalities. In this article, we selectively review the literature relating to redistributive policy in an open economy setting. We then consider some of the implications of globalization for policy design, both within federal systems and across countries. Although globalization poses new challenges for fiscal systems, it does not necessarily imply that redistributive policy becomes untenable and possibly enhances the need for redistribution.

Making Common Fund data more findable: catalyzing a data ecosystem.

The Common Fund Data Ecosystem (CFDE) has created a flexible system of data federation that enables researchers to discover datasets from across the US National Institutes of Health Common Fund without requiring that data owners move, reformat, or rehost those data. This system is centered on a catalog that integrates detailed descriptions of biomedical datasets from individual Common Fund Programs' Data Coordination Centers (DCCs) into a uniform metadata model that can then be indexed and searched from a centralized portal. This Crosscut Metadata Model (C2M2) supports the wide variety of data types and metadata terms used by individual DCCs and can readily describe nearly all forms of biomedical research data. We detail its use to ingest and index data from 11 DCCs.

Pathways to subsistence management in Alaska national parks: Perspectives of harvesters and agency staff

Abstract Alaska Native peoples rely on harvest of animals and plants for cultural, nutritional, social and spiritual benefits. Contemporary management of these resources occurs under state and federal regulations; however, a long history of Indigenous stewardship precedes Western management systems and continues today. To illuminate the areas of compatibility and divergence among Indigenous and Western management systems, we examined multiple perspectives on subsistence management in Western Arctic National Parklands through interviews and focus group discussions with Indigenous (Iñupiat) communities and National Park Service (NPS) staff members in Alaska, USA. We examined perceptions about (1) communication and relationships between subsistence harvesters and NPS staff and (2) barriers to, and solutions for, improving subsistence management. We find various pathways to improving subsistence management from within the NPS structure that were shared between harvesters and management staff including addressing bureaucratic barriers and institutional structures, engaging the public in formal regulatory processes, enhancing community engagement and informal communication pathways, and bridging Indigenous knowledge and Western scientific knowledge systems. Pathways described by both harvesters and agency staff for improving management within the current governance system included fostering local and Indigenous representation in NPS management, minimizing NPS staff turnover, and changing the frequency and style of NPS engagement, especially through in‐person visits to rural villages. NPS staff described the need for increased funding, allocation of time and personnel to facilitate more outreach in villages; such shifts may help mitigate some of the perceived challenges associated with agency responsiveness to harvester needs. Harvesters and agency staff also discussed ways to perpetuate Indigenous stewardship practices outside of the federal (and state) governance systems. Advocating for self‐determination and sovereignty over resource stewardship was the most prevalent theme from harvester interviews. Harvesters discussed power asymmetries that are embedded in the current management system and paths forward for Indigenous self‐determination. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Fluid paths to the cabinet in federal presidential systems: Argentina 1983–2020

ABSTRACT The study of political careers has focused mainly on highly institutionalized systems. This article examines the extent to which the findings from this research agenda apply to more fluid settings, looking at trajectories to the national cabinet in a regime combining presidentialism and federalism: Argentina from 1983 to 2020. We propose an operationalization of political career that integrates five definitional dimensions, looks at full sequences of single occupational positions, and tests six expectations derived from the literature. When only political jobs are taken into account, we found that careers show significant movement from the subnational level and predominance of executive experience. However, when all occupational jobs are considered, political positions are pulled into second place behind the private sector. Most unexpectedly, in a significant percentage of cases, a ministerial position does not appear to be the last step of a political career but rather an initial springboard thereof.