Explaining Federalism

Many works that explore federalism often tend to take the form of descriptive taxonomies that provide thoroughgoing detail of the intricacies of federal structures and practices. Perhaps it is because the individual federal cases may be less familiar to many readers that description, in works like this, can sometimes trump causation. What such studies sometimes miss are issues of explanation and theory. Thankfully, Jan Erk's analysis of the varieties of federalism in five nation states (four European cases plus Canada) in two policy areas (education and media) avoids straightforward narration. In so doing, he offers a sharp critique of a major school of thought among comparativists, namely new institutionalism, in favor of a more society- and culture-based framework that he suggests is stronger in explaining variation in patterns of governance in federal nation states. The book is organized with a first chapter on federalism and congruence in which Erk elaborates the main claim of the book, namely that it is the political institutions that adapt to form congruence with the underlying social and cultural structure. In doing so, he takes direct aim at the new institutionalism literature that argues that the causal arrows flow in the other direction. The subsequent five chapters are country case studies of Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland. This choice was a wise one because it allowed Erk to contrast countries that were ethno-linguistically homogeneous societies (Austria and Germany) with those that were ethnic-linguistically heterogeneous societies (Belgium, Canada, and Switzerland). Providing variation on the dependent variable proved a wise choice in letting the author test his hypothesis regarding the superiority of society-based explanations over more state based ones.

Economics · Federalism · Institutionalism · New institutionalism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Positive economics · Sociology · Law · Political Systems and Governance

• Transforming Unitary States into Federations

  Open Access•Nadim Farhat, Ward Vloeberghs et al.•Publius The Journal of Federalism•2020

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