Constitutional Design and Power-Sharing
in the Post-Modern Epoch
Introduction
Daniel J. Elazar
This book is a product of the fifth conference of the
International Association of Centers for Federal Studies which
met in 1984 at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs in
Jerusalem. Founded in 1977 in Basle, the Association embraces
every research institute whose principal focus is the study of
federalism and it has members on every inhabited continent. The
existence of the Association is a reflection of the federalist
revolution of our times. Although a hidden revolution, the
federalist revolution, along with decolonization, urbanization
and the various scientific and technological revolutions since
the end of World War II has contributed in a major way to the
reshaping of our world, to giving form to the post-modern epoch.
As of last count over a third of the world's population lives
within political systems which formally define themselves as
federal. Over 40 percent more live within political systems
which make use of federal arrangements in one way or another,
ranging from the European Community, a new-style confederation,
to states like Tanzania, where the link between Tanganyika and
Zanzibar is not precisely federal but partakes of many of the
characteristics of constitutionalized power-sharing that we
associate with federalism. Thus nearly three-quarters of the
human race must deal with federal arrangements in their state
political engagements. This figure does not include all the
various forms of local power-sharing which have been
constitutionalized in federalistic ways.
In many cases the existing federal arrangements are overlapping.
Not unexpectedly, the establishment of a pattern tends to lead to
further activity along the same lines. Once on the federalist
bandwagon, so to speak, it becomes easier to use federal
principles and to apply them in a variety of ways to solve
different kinds of problems of governance. Thus the United
States not only has a constitutional division of powers between
the federal government and the 50 states, but 45 states have home
rule provisions in their constitutions which provide for formal
decentralization of powers to their municipal and in some cases
county governments as well. Two offshore entities, Puerto Rico
and the Northern Mariannas Islands, have commonwealth status, and
are what students of federalism have termed "federacies," that is
to say, are linked in an asymmetrical federal relationship with
the United States. Three other island groups are in the process
of becoming associated states, an asymmetrical confederal
linkage. Virtually all of the dozens of recognized Indian tribes
are recognized in American constitutional law and increasingly in
practice as "dependent sovereign nations," another form of
federacy relationship within the continental limits of the
U.S.A.1
Even in political systems that are not formally federal, federal
arrangements have become widespread. For example, Israel is not
a federal system by any definition, but rural local government in
Israel is organized along strictly and even conventional federal
lines with every settlement a constituent part of a regional
council. Most cities are constitutional units in single or
multi-purpose confederations of cities. Statewide, Israeli
politics for many years was based on consociational arrangements,
elements of which still prevail, and federal principals have been
applied in other ways in Israeli settlement society.2
Consociational arrangements may, themselves, represent a form of
federalism. Arend Lijphart and his colleagues, who have
developed and applied the concept of consociationalism, have been
engaged in dialogue with those of us committed to studying
federalism over the past several years to identify similarities
and differences between the two approaches and have found much
that is similar.3 In sum, when we are dealing with federalism we
are dealing with a phenomenon that is now so widespread that it
is almost as pervasive as the nation-state itself. It is a
phenomenon that supplements, modifies and redirects nation-states
and governmental institutions within nation-states. Hence it is
deserving of far more attention than it has received. One of the
tasks of the Association is to encourage the attention federalism
deserves. Our conferences are one way in which we seek to do so.
Each is a working conference, that is to say, the people who
participate in it all have been active in one way or another in
exploring the issues of power-sharing, federalism and
constitutional design along federal principles.
In addition to the benefits of face-to-face interchange and
cross-fertilization, we seek to make the principal results of our
conferences more widely available in book form. The first
conference in Basle led to a book edited by Max Frenkel, then the
director of the Joint Center for Federal and Regional Studies in
that city, Foderalismus als Partnerschaft/Partnership in
Federalism, the first statements of the idea of the theory and
practice of cooperative federalism made available to the
German-speaking world.4 Redesigning the State, our second book,
was edited by Keith G. Banting and Richard Simeon and developed
out of the conference at the Institute for Intergovernmental
Relations at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario.5 It deals
with constitutional change in contemporary federal and
non-federal systems. The Association also sponsored the
publication of William Stewart's Concepts of Federalism, a
lexicon of federalism that defines each conceptualization of the
term and gives its history.6
This, the third volume in the series, examines the state of the
art and the state of the field in the study of the two principal
dimensions of federalism -- constitutional design and
power-sharing. The emphasis in this volume is on exploring the
frontiers of federalist theory and practice. What new federal
forms, devices and arrangements are being proposed and tested?
What are the theories which either suggest or justify them? It
focuses on the relationship between theory and empirical reality
on a theoretical and comparative basis.
The essays in this volume are designed to contribute to the
development of a political science not dependent on Jacobin,
Marxian, or Weberian models of political analysis which have
informed so much of social and hence political science over the
past century but which, by their very nature, have great
difficulty in dealing with the phenomena of federalism. This
volume comes at a time when there is a real opening toward
developing federalist modes of thought about political questions
parallel to the Marxian-Jacobin-Weberian modes. Hence we wee it
as an opportunity to articulate a number of the important
political questions of our time within a theoretical framework, a
language, and a set of thought hypotheses which most of the
contributors has been hard at work developing over the years but
which constantly need to be presented in more coherent form to
the larger academic and intellectual communities, who, more often
than not, do not see the importance of the questions we
investigate because they are bound within a different conceptual
system.
One of the advantages of the federalist approach is that it
forces scholars and activists alike to concern themselves with
the most mundane details of political activity and at the same
time with the largest principles of human endeavor. Moreover, the
federalist approach combines both theoretical and empirical
analysis out of necessity since federalist theories are only
useful when they measure up against reality, while understanding
the realities of federalism requires an appropriate theoretical
perspective. That interaction is very much evident in the essays
included here.
An earlier conference of the Jerusalem Center developed a
shorthand definition of federalism as the combination of
self-rule and shared-rule.7 Constitutional design is what makes
self-rule possible and power-sharing is the essence of
shared-rule. In addressing both we address both sides of the
equation. Doing so, we explore the development of an
international system of federated states parallel to the
conventional international system of politically sovereign states
and the increased linkages among the two systems. This in turn
relates to the emergence of new applications of federal
principles through new-style confederations, federacies,
associated states and the like.8
On another level two perennial questions of culture and structure
are addressed. Is there a federal political culture? To what
extent is such a political culture necessary for true federalism?
What is the impact of federal structures on systems that have
only adopted them as window-dressing, as in the Soviet bloc or in
certain Third World countries? Obviously we cannot provide
definitive answers to these question, but it is our hope that we
have advanced the exploration by taking a cut at them in
something analogous to the way a geologist or archeologist works
with strata.
The first essay in this volume is by Vincent Ostrom, one of
the principal federal theorists of our time, who applies his
approach of methodological individualism to present "A
Computational-Conceptual Logic for Federal Systems of
Governance." Ostrom starts from the kind of individualism
characteristic of the new science of politics of the 17th century
as played out on the American scene and reflected in the American
constitutional system. Ostrom, Arthur F. Bentley Professor of
Government at Indiana University, is co-director of the Workshop
on Political Theory and Policy Analysis, one of the major centers
for the exploration of federalist theory today. It is no
exaggeration to say that his work has transformed contemporary
conceptions of local government organization and administration.
Ivo Duchacek, late Professor Emeritus of International Relations
at the City University of New York and one of the leading
scholars of international politics and constitutional design of
our time, brings the empirical world of federal arrangements into
focus in "Comparative Federalism: An Agenda for Additional
Research." He suggests four concrete areas in particular need of
further exploration: federal processes without federal
institutions, federal political culture, coincidence of
intra-federal and ethnic boundaries, and external roles of
provinces and cities. He examines what has been explored in those
four areas and what needs to be.
If Ostrom examines the "different conceptions [that] may be used
to design, construct and maintain different social realities,"
offering an individualistic basis for federalism, Joseph Lanir,
working out of a collectivist, or perhaps more correctly, an
integral conception, gives us a case study of a different kind of
federalist institution, the Israeli kibbutz, in "The Kibbutz as a
Federative Socio-Political System." Dr. Lanir, a veteran member
of Givat Brenner, one of Israel's largest and most important
kibbutzim and one of the architects of kibbutz industry in
Israel, an economic sector also organized on federal lines, has
done pioneering work on federal principles in the kibbutz
movement.
Moving back into the American individualist mode we have Robert
M. Hawkins on "Power-Sharing in Municipal Governance," a look at
federal arrangements in the local arena in the United States and
how they have sought to integrate individualistic and
communitarian perspectives in that country. Dr. Hawkins, the
president of the Institute for Contemporary Studies in San
Francisco and the Sequoia Institute in Sacramento and chairman of
the U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, was
one of the first to take Vincent Ostrom's theories of local
constitutional design and apply them to the existing local
government arena, in California.
Another dimension of federalist theory is the chapter by Efraim
Torgovnik and Ela Preisler on "Effectiveness Assessment in Public
Service Systems." In it they report on the use of parallel
frameworks to assess effectiveness in public service systems,
particularly local public service systems. It is the essence of
their theory that evaluation should take place on two levels: the
system level and the unit level. In their chapter they present
their formula and how it was tested in examining a neighborhood
decentralization effort in a Jerusalem neighborhood, Neve Yaakov,
undertaken by the Jerusalem Municipality. Efraim Torgovnik is a
Fellow of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and Professor
of Political Science at Tel Aviv University. He is one of the
foremost students of urban politics and government in Israel. Dr.
Ela Preisler was his graduate student when this project was
conducted. The chapter was previously published in Human
Relations, Vol. 40, No. 2 (1987), pp. 103-118.
Turning to another issue, John Kincaid analyzes "Sharing Power in
the Federal System: The American States in World Affairs," to
introduce our exploration of the integration of parallel systems
in the international arena. Dr. Kincaid, a Fellow of the Center
for the Study of Federalism at Temple University and Professor of
Political Science at North Texas University, is co-editor of
Publius. He is presently serving as Executive Director of the
Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations. In his study
of the American states in foreign relations, he is continuing
decades of work of the Center for the Study of Federalism, begun
by its predecessor, the Workshop in American Federalism at the
University of Chicago in the 1950s. He is presently completing a
major project funded by the Ford Foundation on this subject.
A different kind of intersection of federal arrangements in the
international system is described by this writer in "The Federal
Dimensions of State-Diaspora Relations: The Case of Israel and
the Jewish People." In this essay I explore what may be an
emerging form of federalism on the international scene, the
state-diaspora relationship, which combines the realities of
contemporary statehood with the realities of the persistence of
primordial groups -- ethnic, religious, or ethno-religious. The
essay examines the phenomenon and the institutional arrangements
developing to provide for its governance within the contemporary
political arena.
Twin questions of how is political integration on a federal basis
different from other forms of political integration and to what
extent can federal principles and arrangements be used to advance
political integration are addressed by Andre Eschet-Schwartz in
"Can the Swiss Federal Experience Serve as a Model of Federal
Integration?" Dr. Eschet-Schwartz, who lectures at the
University of Haifa and is associated with the Jerusalem Center
for Public Affairs, looks at the history of one of the world's
classic federal systems to trace the important constitutional
elements in its movement from league to confederation to
federation over a period of nearly 600 years. Switzerland is
often used as an example of a hard case of political integration
because of its multiple diversities -- linguistic (German,
French, Italian and Romansch), religious (Protestants and
Catholics), economic (urban commercial and rural), and political
(urban oligarchies and rural democracies) that nevertheless
managed over the course of centuries to build a stable democratic
federal republic that has taken on idyllic status in the eyes of
much of the world because of its peace and prosperity. His
account is both hopeful and sobering in that it shows how
possible it is to use federal principles and arrangements to
achieve the political integration of one-time antagonists but
that it takes patience and the passage of generations to do so.
Marcel Korn of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs writes
about "Free Association: Political Integration as a Trade-Off," a
wide-ranging comparative examination of asymmetrical political
integration utilizing federal principles and arrangements. In
doing so he reports on the results of a major study of the
subject that he conducted under the auspices of the Jerusalem
Center. The discussion by Hillel Frisch of the Jerusalem Center
of "Polities with Compound Conflicts" is another product of the
JCPA's continuing study of that problem. His essay examines the
possibility of federal solutions to the Israel-Palestinian Arab
conflict in light of the possible uses of federal solutions in
other cases where there are polities with compound and
cross-cutting conflicts.
Shmuel Sandler examines de facto "Joint Control and Power-Sharing
in the Israeli-Palestinian Context." Dr. Sandler, a Fellow of the
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and Senior Lecturer in
Political Studies at Bar-Ilan University, spent much of the last
decade studying questions he addresses in this chapter as part of
the Jerusalem Center's larger project exploring federal solutions
to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Dr. Sandler explores the
difficult practical question of power-sharing among two unequal
entities. This chapter was originally published in Publius: The
Journal of Federalism 18 (Spring 1988).
Benjamin Akzin, the doyen of Israeli political scientists,
summarizes his understanding of the present place of federalism
on the world political scene in "Where Do We Stand?," the book's
epilogue. The late Professor Akzin, Israel's first professor of
political science, was an internationally recognized expert in
problems of ethnicity, states and nations. Here he draws on the
accumulated wisdom of a long career in Eastern and Central
Europe, the United States, and Israel to strike an appropriately
cautionary note on the possibility of successfully applying
federal solutions to current political problems in situations not
properly developed for such solutions.
The essays in this collection reflect the need for further
development of federal theory and to clarify and harmonize
federal terminology, in light of these new directions in which
federalism is moving. In this, as in every other field, as we
advance knowledge, we discover how much we do not know. This is
especially true in the case of unconventional uses and
expressions of federal principles, the principal concern to which
this volume is devoted. The concern here has been not merely to
report data regarding the success or failure of particular
federal experiments, or even to discuss how federal principles
might be applied to new situations, but to think of all of that
within the context of the larger concerns of federal theory
regarding political, civic, social, and economic organization.
Notes
1. I have explored this phenomenon more fully in Daniel J.
Elazar, Exploring Federalism (University, Ala.: University of
Alabama Press, 1987), Chapter 2.
2. See Daniel J. Elazar and Chaim Kalchheim, eds. Local
Government in Israel (Lanham, Md.: Jerusalem Center for Public
Affairs and University Press of America, 1988).
3. See "Federalism and Consociationalism," special issue of
Publius, the Journal of Federalism, Vol. 15, No. 2 (Spring 1985).
4. Max Frenkel, ed., Foderalismus als Partnerschaft/Partnership
in Federalism (Bern: Peter Lang, 1977).
5. Keith G. Banting and Richard Simeon, Redesigning the State;
Politics of Constitutional Change (Toronto: Macmillan, 1986).
6. William Stewart, Concepts of Federalism (Lanham, Md.: Center
for the Study of Federalism and University Press of America,
1984).
7. See Daniel J. Elazar, ed., Self-Rule/Shared Rule (Lanham, Md.:
Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and University Press of
America, 1985).
8. Cf. Daniel J. Elazar, ed., Federalism and Political
Integration (Lanham, Md.: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and
University Press of America, 1985).
