Methods and Patterns of Subnational Contestation in Federal States

• In Event: Standing Up to the Feds: State Challenges to Federal Authority

Abstract

The dominant characteristic of federal systems is a plan of institutional design that channels the most serious anticipated intrasocietal tensions into the mold of national-subnational conflict. Once contained within that arena, conflicts are then managed in federal systems through maintenance of a careful – and sometimes surprisingly flexible and responsive – balance between the powers, competencies, and ultimately the political salience of national and subnational institutions of self-governance. Federalism is therefore a species of constitutional design that not only contemplates, but indeed invites intergovernmental contestation.

Constitutions are the vehicles by which federal states design and implement sustainable systems of contestatory federalism. The kinds of intergovernmental conflicts that federal systems produce, and the ways in which they are (or are not) resolved, depend to some degree on many design factors including the kinds of cleavages the federal system recognizes or creates, the tools of contestation that the constitutional plan provides to each level of government, and the institutional settings into which such conflicts are steered. Furthermore, the flexibility and adaptability of constitutionally entrenched institutions may determine whether conflicts are resolved according to the constitutional plan or whether national and subnational actors are driven to seek alternative, extraconstitutional forums and mechanisms in and by which to work out their differences in mutually satisfactory ways.

This paper reports on field research undertaken in nine federal or quasi-federal states – Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. It identifies the principal tools and methods that subnational units in these states deploy to influence national political agendas and to resist or undermine unwanted exercises of national power. It then analyzes the extent to which subnational units rely on tools of contestation provided by the constitutional scheme, or resort to innovative or extraconstitutional methods for contesting national power.

Author

• James A. Gardner, State University of New York