Political Stability In Federal Governments

Features

Description

Lemco investigates those political, economic, and social conditions that theorists of federalism have associated with the stability or instability of federations. For many years, there have been pervasive arguments that federalism provides the best government possible for a nation of considerable ethnic and regional disparity.

Students of federations have suggested that a centralized federal government that protects the national interest, and governments of the constituent units that protect local and regional interests, are the most responsive administrative forms for a society of great diversity. Following a review of the theoretical literature concerning federalism and political stability, data pertaining to political, social, and economic conditions that are reputed to be related to federal political stability are collected and tested.

These conditions include the structure of politics, the impact of political freedom, the importance of the party system, and the relevance of ethnically and territorially based cleavages. The associations among economic modernization, social mobilization, relative deprivation, and federal political stability are also investigated.

The author concludes with a discussion of the most significant independent variables, the prospects for future research, and a focus on the extent to which federal and unitary structures can protect minority rights effectively. Lemco's provocative study will be of considerable interest to political theoreticians as well as to students of contemporary nationalist movements.

Review: ? The federal constitutional structure, Lemco notes, has become especially popular in this century. His book investigates various aspects of federal systems of government based on 44 federations formed over the past 200 years, 27 of which failed to stay together or turned into centralized unitary states.

Federalism, he writes, is an attractive but fragile constitutional form --attractive because it seems to facilitate unity with diversity in political systems, and fragile because the diverse subnational units that comprise the federation frequently are not able to reconcile their differences satisfactorily enough to permit the federation to continue.

Lemco's primary interest is in the stability of federal systems: which elements contribute to stability and which reduce stability? He looks at structures, political freedoms, cleavages (race, religion, language), modernization, and economic prosperity of the constituent units and calculates the impact of dependent variables within each of these broad categories on the ongoing federation based on his sample of 44 federations.

The sample includes as ongoing federations the USSR (since 1922) and Yugoslavia (since 1946). The USSR under Communist party rule claimed to be a federation, but was one only on paper and not in reality. Yugoslavia's 1974 constitution created a confederal system, providing vast decision-making authority to the constituent republics.

With Tito's death (1980) and the collapse of the Communist party as a centralized political force soon thereafter, Yugoslavia by the mid-1980s was no longer operating as a federation. Footnotes; useful bibliography. Recommended for students (all levels) and general readers.?-Choice