An Institutional Explanation of the Formation of Intergovernmental Agreements in Federal Systems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Intergovernmental agreements are a common and useful instrument in federal systems, serving a variety of purposes from establishing new social programs, regulating agricultural practices, and even changing a country's constitution. Despite their importance, there have only been limited attempts to understand agreements in a comparative context or to provide a theoretical framework for their study. This dissertation addresses both of these deficiencies by comparing the use of agreements in seven federations and considering why certain federations form more agreements than others.\nIn order to understand these differences in intergovernmental agreement formation, this thesis proposes an institutionalist approach with two components. First, agreements are defined as intergovernmental institutions, and thus, their creation is characterized as a process of institutional formation. Second, seven institutional variables are proposed as factors which are expected to affect the likelihood that a federation will form agreements. These are: the constitutional division of powers (including centralization and overlap), the existence of intrastate federalism, the size and status of the federal spending power, the size of the welfare state, the number of constituent units and the presence of lasting forums for intergovernmental relations. To test these hypotheses, data were gathered from seven federal systems, including two nascent ones: Australia, Canada, Germany, South Africa, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. Each federation and its record of intergovernmental agreement formation is examined qualitatively in light of each of the seven variables. The results of the individual country studies are then compared to determine whether the institutional approach provides a consistent explanation of agreement formation.\nThis analysis finds that the formation of intergovernmental agreements seems to be greatly influenced by the institutional environment. While each hypothesis was not confirmed in every case, in unison they provide a comprehensive explanation for the record of agreement formation in six of the seven federations. The institutional approach provided only a partial explanation in the German case, however, indicating that there are some shortcomings to this theory. Despite these limitations, this thesis represents an effective comparative approach to the study of agreements and a successful application of institutional theory in comparative politics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".