Assessing the impact of federalism on constitutional compliance
Jaroslaw Kantorowicz () and
Stefan Voigt ()
Additional contact information
Jaroslaw Kantorowicz: Leiden University
Stefan Voigt: University of Hamburg
Constitutional Political Economy, 2025, vol. 36, issue 3, No 4, 328-350
Abstract:
Abstract Federalism is a constitutionalized version of multi-tier governance. Proponents of veto-player theory argue that a high number of veto players leads to a high degree of policy stability. Compared to states with a unitary structure, federal countries, in which at least one sub-central level of government is constitutionally recognized and endowed with some degree of exclusive competences, dispose of a higher number of veto players, who can voice and challenge constitutional non-compliance by the central government. In this paper, we therefore ask whether federally constituted states also enjoy a higher degree of constitutional compliance, i.e. have governments that respect and enforce the promises made in their country’s constitution. At the same time, with a higher number of governments under federalism, there are more chances that some of them will not comply with constitutional constraints leading to greater non-compliance. To test these hypotheses, we employ data from up to 163 countries and apply standard panel data estimation techniques. Our results indicate that federalism is neither positively nor negatively correlated with constitutional compliance of the respective countries.
Keywords: Constitutional compliance; de jure-de facto gap; Federalism; s: H11; K10; K42; P48; Z10; Z18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:
Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10602-024-09459-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:copoec:v:36:y:2025:i:3:d:10.1007_s10602-024-09459-8
Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/10602/PS2
DOI: 10.1007/s10602-024-09459-8
Access Statistics for this article
Constitutional Political Economy is currently edited by Roger Congleton and Stefan Voigt
More articles in Constitutional Political Economy from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().