1.2. DEFINITIONS
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A study focused exclusively on the United States would be tempted to conclude that
the main threat to federal harmony is when the national government swallows the states’
authorities (what we will call encroachment). The U.S. federal government, after all, holds
the lion’s share of the purse strings and controls the military. Contrast that threat with
Argentina’s current fiscal frustrations, where paradoxically the provinces are both chokers
and the choked, and they cannot escape their own collective stranglehold. We begin to see
that what is particular about our federation, the apparent overcentralization, might not be a
general trend. A whole book CITATION has been dedicated to descriptive phrases of feder-
alism: ones we encounter regularly are cooperative v. competitive federalism, peripheralized
v. centralized federations, coming-together v. coming-apart federations. In the midst of
this variety, can we uncover general properties of federations? That is, are there important
similarities between the US, Argentina, Canada, and Australia, that might provide lessons
for Russia, South Africa, and the European Union?
1.2
Definitions
Studies of successful federations to date have been plagued by definitional problems, leaving
(frustratingly, improbably) both the subject (federalism) and the dependent variable (here,
robustness) undefined. In this section I define both subject and dependent variable.
6
1.2.1
Federalism
It is not a straightforward task to list all federations in existence. Definitions are often too
vague to enable objective coding. For example, Riker’s (1987:101) definition is often used,
despite its ambiguity: “a political organization in which the activities of government are
divided between regional governments and a central government in such a way that each
kind of government has some activities on which it makes final decisions.” Many works
6
This section elaborates some of the themes presented in my article “Federalism as a Public Good,”
Constitutional Political Economy 16(2), June 2005.
Convention