Enhanced Cooperation in Federal States: Democracy through Asymmetry

Gulnara Shaikhutdinova

Public administration issues, 2017, issue 5, 72-82

Abstract: The article focuses on a comparative analysis of the cooperation mechanisms of a federal center and constituent units based on the constitutional principle of flexibility. Cooperation mechanisms in Switzerland, Canada, the USA and the Russian Federation are studied in detail with the purpose of identifying enhanced cooperation forms and revealing the principle of flexibility influence on these forms. It is determined that enhanced cooperation, based on the treaties between a federal center and constituent units, inevitably leads to asymmetry within the federal system. The hypothesis of the article is that implementation of the principle of flexibility in the form of enhanced cooperation between a federal center and constituent units ensure democratic change and effectiveness of federations. Asymmetric federation as a pluralistic form ensures democratic rights, minorities rights, representation and participation. It represents a tool for achieving unity in diversity.

Keywords: federalism; asymmetry; enhanced cooperation; principle of flexibility; democracy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://vgmu.hse.ru/data/2017/08/21/1174218584/Shaikhutdinova%205-2017.pdf (application/pdf)

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:nos:vgmu00:2017:i:5:p:72-82

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Public administration issues from Higher School of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Irina A. Zvereva ().