Beyond intergovernmental relations in federal systems: the concept of intergovernmental law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In federal systems, irrespective of the official division of powers, the development and implementation of public policy increasingly require the input of various orders of government. Concerted action is an everyday phenomenon in wide ranges of domains, such as health care, immigration, transportation, environmental protection, public safety, and pandemic management. Countless studies have explored intergovernmental interaction in federal systems, both from a political science and policy perspective. Faced with federal realpolitik, law is often considered to be ‘beside the point’. While constitutional law provides a backdrop (particularly the division of powers, courts, and second chambers), law is otherwise largely a blind spot of federal studies. Yet, in democracies founded on the rule of law, all public action must, at some point, be grounded in law, or at least accountable to law. This is also true of federal democracies. The production and implementation of law in complex intergovernmental contexts are oddly understudied, as are the processes of accountability for intergovernmental executive action. To shed light on the various ways through which legal norms, principles, processes and institutions shape federal governance, this paper introduces the concept of Intergovernmental Law (IGL). I posit that IGL has three main components. Upstream, it is composed of constitutional norms and institutions that shape intergovernmental action. Downstream, IGL includes processes of judicial review and parliamentary scrutiny of administrative and executive actions taken in an intergovernmental context. Midstream, it comprises specific toolboxes of legislative and executive law-making devices that help structure interactions and create complex normative networks. Cheryl Saunders’ scholarship in domestic and comparative constitutional law informs almost every aspect of the overarching concept of intergovernmental law. This article is a tribute to Cheryl’s invaluable contribution to federal studies, notably her efforts in shedding light on the role of law in shaping federal theory and practice.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.043 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".