Tensions between central authorities and subnational units over centralization and fiscal autonomy are on top of the political agenda in many developing federal countries.

This book examines historical changes in the balance between the resources that presidents and governors control and the policy responsibilities they have to deliver. It focuses on Argentina and Brazil, the most decentralized federal countries in Latin America, with the most powerful sub-national governments in the region. Using formal modelling, statistical tools, and comparative historical analyses, it examines...

Federal Democracies examines the evolution of the relationship between federalism and democracy. Taking the late 18th century US Federal Experience as its starting-point, the book uses the contributions of Calhoun, Bryce and Proudhon as 19th century conceptual prisms through which we can witness the challenges and changes made to the meaning of this relationship. The book then goes on to provide a series of case studies to examine contemporary examples of federalism and includes chapters on Canada, USA, Russia, Germany, Spain, Belgium, Switzerland and the emerging European Union....

This book addresses the democratic accommodation of national pluralism through federal rules. The key question is: can federalism be a fair and workable way of articulating multinational societies according to revised liberal-democratic patterns? In recent years, scholarly discussion on this issue has undergone a change. Nowadays, the answer to this question is much more complex than the one that traditional political liberalism and federalism used to give us. In the past, these two political approaches usually addressed the question of political pluralism without seriously including...

The Global Financial Crisis has led to a renewed attention for the management of public debt and deficits of advanced and developing industrial states. To successfully deal with such problems of public finances raises particular concerns in federal states where fiscal competencies are split between two levels of government.

This book offers comparative in-depth knowledge of political struggles related to fiscal consolidation policies in eleven federal states since the 1990s, including the Global Financial Crisis and its aftermath. It identifies conditions that lead to...

In the last years of their existence, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) found themselves facing a similar and very grim state of affairs. After their disintegration, the former Yugoslav republics spiralled into a set of ethnic conflicts that did not leave a single one of them unscathed, and in the ex-Soviet space, conflicts were far more limited.

This book offers an in-depth analysis of the difference in state collapses and ensuing conflicts in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia by focusing on their asymmetric...

Attaining the benefits of (especially fiscal) decentralization in government remains an enduring challenge, in part because, the re-arrangement of public functions across levels of government has often been carried out poorly.

This book aims at providing a firmer conceptual basis for the re-arrangement of public functions across levels of government. In doing so, it also offers practical advice for policy makers from developing and emerging countries and development cooperation practitioners engaged in such activity. Combining a theoretical approach for inter-governmental...