How Centralized Federations Avoid Over-centralization
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract The focus of this article is centralized types of federations that have been neglected both in the economic literature on federalism and in comparative federal studies. The starting point is that countries with centralized institutional solutions are subject to encroaching behaviour by the central government and are threatened with shifting further towards 'over-centralization'. 'Over-centralization' reduces federal member states to pure 'agents' of central government. By comparing four federal countries subject to centralization trends (Australia, Austria, Germany and Switzerland) and combinations of causal factors, an attempt is made to ascertain why some federations are locked in 'over-centralized' institutional solutions while others are able to ward off such an outcome. Keywords: Centralisationcomparative federalismdynamics of federalism Notes An exception is provided by Lemco Citation(1991). However, see Blanchard and Shleifer Citation(2000) and Parker and Thornton Citation(2007) with regard to China and Russia. Over-centralization is a state of affairs in which the central government has grown "so forceful that the subunits either rise up in challenge or wither into nonexistence, legally or in practice" (Bednar, Citation2009: 2). Over-decentralization can be seen as a state of affairs in which subunits have become so powerful and autonomous that the coherence of the federation is endangered. Encroaching can mean either to reduce the authority of subunits for one's own ends or to shift costs and other burdens to subunits (Bednar, Citation2009: 69). Self-enforcing mechanisms mean mostly institutional safeguards that deter actors, either the central government or subunits, from breaking with the status quo and respect the previously agreed settlement of co-operation. Of course, Canada has made its way in the other direction: from a more centralized federation to a more decentralized one. The reasons for this are well known but will not interest us here. 'Cultural federalism' (Hueglin and Fenna, Citation2006: 57–58) or 'nationality based federal units' (Kymlicka, Citation2005: 277). 'Territorial federalism' (Hueglin and Fenna, Citation2006: 57–58) or 'regional based federal units' (Kymlicka, Citation2005: 277). See Münch Citation(2008) for education policy. See, in general, Galligan Citation(1995), Selway Citation(2001) and Braun Citation(2005). One distinguishes between laws that need the consent of the Bundesrat in matters that directly concern the affairs of subunits and laws that do not need this consent in all other matters. Before the reform of 2006, the number of laws with consent needed was about half of all laws; after the reform it seems to have gone down to 30–40%. Subunit representatives in both countries have become principally partisan representatives and not representatives who defend regional interests (see, for Austria, Erk, Citation2004: 7, fn 27). This corresponds to the preference structure of the population which is in line with partisan cleavages and not with territorially based cleavages. Double majority means that a referendum is accepted if there is both a majority of the people and of the majority of the 26 cantons. Intergovernmental Agreement on Federal Financial Relations, 29 Nov 2008 (http://www.coag.gov.au). Either because such veto-powers are lacking or, if they exist, because they cannot be used, as in the case of congruent majorities between the first and second chamber. If a condition is not present, this is usually denoted in small letters. If, therefore, party opposition is present we write it as 'f'. A multiplication sign indicates multiple causation. Variables that are multiplied are seen as individually necessary parts of a jointly sufficient combination. A 'plus' sign (sum) indicates equifinality. In this case both the combinations of causal variables on the left and on the right side of the plus sign are sufficient for the outcome.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it