scholarly journals Rethinking The Origins of Federalism: Puzzle, Theory, and Evidence from Nineteenth-Century Europe

2004 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Ziblatt

This article examines the paradox of how federal political institutions are created: how can a state-building core be unyielding enough to forge a union but accommodating enough to grant federal concessions to subunits? A comparison of the trajectories of national unification in nineteenth-century Germany and Italy indicates that the formation of federations does not come about exclusively through voluntary “contract”; instead, coercion and cooperation go hand in hand in the formation of all states, including federations. Whether the outcome is federal or unitary depends on the level of subunit infrastructural capacity at the moment of founding.The article finds that where the constituents of a potential federation are parliamentary and well governed, they can deliver the benefits of state formation, assuring their continued existence in a federation. Where such subunits are patrimonial and poorly governed, they are absorbed within a unitary model of governance. This institutional explanation supplements accounts emphasizing the cultural sources of federalism and revises arguments that only militarily weak founding cores make federal concessions to their constituents.

The Forum ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 569-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer L. Lawless ◽  
Richard L. Fox

Abstract From the moment Donald Trump took the oath of office, women’s political engagement skyrocketed. This groundswell of activism almost immediately led to widespread reporting that Trump’s victory was inspiring a large new crop of female candidates across the country. We rely on a May 2017 national survey of “potential candidates” and the 2018 midterm election results to assess whether this “Trump Effect” materialized. Our analysis uncovers some evidence for it. Democrats – especially women – held very negative feelings toward Trump, and those feelings generated heightened political interest and activity during the 2018 election cycle. That activism, however, was not accompanied by a broad scale surge in women’s interest in running for office. In fact, the overall gender gap in political ambition today is quite similar to the gap we’ve uncovered throughout the last 20 years. Notably, though, about one quarter of the Democratic women who expressed interest in running for office first started thinking about it only after Trump was elected. That relatively small group of newly interested candidates was sufficient to result in a record number of Democratic women seeking and winning election to Congress. With no commensurate increase in Republican women’s political engagement or candidate emergence, however, prospects for gender parity in US political institutions remain bleak.


1976 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Peeler

Colombia remains one of a very small group of countries in Latin America which retain competitive, liberal-democratic political institutions at this writing. Indeed, Colombia's civil government, recognizing a modicum of individual liberties and conducting periodic elections, has been shattered on relatively few occasions since the mid-nineteenth century, a record equalled or surpassed by few other Latin American countries. The Colombian political system is still dominated by the two traditional political parties (Liberal and Conservative) which arose in Colombia and elsewhere in the region in the nineteenth century. In almost every other country they have long since passed into oblivion or insignificance. This continued dominance by the traditional parties is commonly attributed to their successful mobilization of mass support, especially among the peasantry. The Colombian parties (unlike their counterparts elsewhere) early moved beyond being mere elite factions by using traditional authority relationships, clientelistic exchanges and ideological appeals to develop durable bases of mass support.


Balcanica ◽  
2004 ◽  
pp. 91-158
Author(s):  
Milos Lukovic

With the partitioning in 1373 of the domain of Nikola Altomanovic, a Serbian feudal lord, the old political core of the Serbian heartland was shattered and the feudal Bosnian state considerably extended to the east. The region was crossed by the Tara river, mostly along the southeast-northwest "Dinaric course". Although the line along which Altomanovic?s domain was partitioned has been discussed on several occasions and over a comparatively long period, analyses show that the identification of its section south of the Tara is still burdened by a number of unanswered questions, which are the topic of this paper. An accurate identification of this historical boundary is of interest not only to historiography, but also to archaeology ethnology, philology (the history of language and dialectology in particular) and other related disciplines. The charters of Alphonse V and Friedrich III concerning the domain of herceg Stefan Vukcic Kosaca, and other historical sources relating to the estates of the Kosaca cannot reliably con?rm that the zupa of Moraca belonged to the Kosaca domain. The castrum Moratsky and the civitate Morachij from the two charters stand for the fortress near the village of Gornje Morakovo in the zupa of Niksic known as Mrakovac in the nineteenth century, and as Jerinin Grad/Jerina?s Castle in recent times. The zupa of Moraca, as well as the neighbouring Zupa of Brskovo in the Tara river valley, belonged to the domain of the Brankovic from the moment the territory of zupan Nikola Altomanovic was partitioned until 1455, when the Turks ?nally conquered the region thereby ending the 60-year period of dual, Serbian-Turkish, rule. Out of the domain of the Brankovic the Turks created two temporary territorial units: Krajiste of Issa-bey Ishakovic and the Vlk district (the latter subsequently became the san?ak of Vucitrn). The zupa of Moraca became part of Issa-bey Ishakovic?s domain, and was registered as such, although the fact is more di?cult to see from the surviving Turkish cadastral record. The zupa of Moraca did not belong to the vilayet of Hersek, originally established by the Turks within their temporary vilayet system after most of the Kosaca domain had been seized. It was only with the establishing of the San?ak of Herzegovina that three nahiyes which formerly constituted the Zupa of Moraca (Donja/Lower Moraca, Gornja/Upper Moraca and Rovci) were detached from Issa-bey?s territory and included into the San?ak of Hercegovina. It was then that they were registered as part of that San?ak and began to be regarded as being part of Herzegovina.


Author(s):  
Timothy Besley ◽  
Torsten Persson

This chapter explores the forces that shape investments in fiscal capacity. It sets out a core model that shows how this aspect of state building is influenced by economic and political factors, such as common interests and political institutions. A key feature of the model has been to delineate the types of states that can emerge in equilibrium. It also shows that the model can be given microeconomic foundations and demonstrates how it can be extended in a number of directions that lead to more realism. The main focus of the chapter has been on the extractive role of government and on some of the issues raised in traditional public-finance models. This has laid the groundwork for the analyses to come.


Killing Times ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 185-216
Author(s):  
David Wills

This chapter puts the instant of execution into contrast with the different time frames of the crime itself and of court proceedings. The analysis works through a particular nineteenth-century multiple homicide in France—studied by a team led by Michel Foucault—committed by Pierre Rivière. The case is distinguished by the memoir that Rivière wrote as a justification for his crime but that, in various ways, became part of the crime itself. The murders occurred when “extenuating circumstances” were being accepted as a criminal defense and when psychological testimony was finding its way into proceedings. Both those tendencies extend the crime into the past history of the criminal mind and show how the moment of committing a crime becomes part of a longer narrative—or even literary—fantasy that is in some respects indistinguishable from what we understand as a motive. The chapter ends with a discussion of Kafka’s “death penalty” fiction.


2019 ◽  
pp. 93-104
Author(s):  
Najum Mushtaq

This chapter discusses the correlation between bottom-up local reconciliation and state-building in Somalia. It identifies key conflict actors in three regional states, and postulates general trends in local conflicts and how to address them. Rather than promoting grassroots reconciliation between various sets of clans engaged in localized conflicts throughout south-central Somalia, the process of forming Federal Member States has intensified and, in some cases, revived conflicts over regional boundaries, land use, and political representation. The urgency to meet the New Deal benchmarks has led to what independent observers consider to be contentious and hasty state-formation. The 2013–17 period was marred by a surge in clan-based violence as discontent grew among those clans that felt they received an unfair deal.


2003 ◽  
Vol 63 (1) ◽  
pp. 268-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siddarth Chandra

Written by four leading economic historians of Indonesia from three continents, this book is an excellent account of the emergence of the Indonesian economy in the twentieth century from what was a cluster of disparate economic regions at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Using an innovative and, in the context of Indonesia, highly appropriate theme, the authors identify three fundamental forces that shaped the emergence of the Indonesian national economy: successive waves of globalization (and dislocation), state formation, and economic integration. The book is admirably successful in fulfilling its claim, not an easy task given the volume of literature that had to be mastered and put into perspective in order to comprehensively describe this process.


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