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Controversially, Riker saw all main American federal institutions as
“centralizing” – the presidency, the Congress, the Supreme Court. In their operation,
these institutions most of the times effectively promoted further centralization and
national integration. In Canada, on the other hand, federal institutions failed to preserve
the dominance of the center by allowing the role of provincial governments in the
determining federal policies to expand over time.
Implications of the Federal Theory for the Democratic Transition
In Riker’s theory, formal federal constitutional provisions are not as important as
their actual implementation and “operation.” After the federal constitution has been
successfully adopted, it’s operation is endogenous to political process, to incentives of
politicians, mostly linked to their electoral calculus. The focus on the federal practice as
opposite to formal constitutional provisions relates Riker to the works of two influential
scholars of federalism before him, K.C. Wheare, and W. S. Livingston. The central point
of Wheare’s famous Federal Government was to refocus federal studies from formalism
of constitutional provisions to real federal practice. William Livingston advanced
Wheare’s idea by proposing that the difference between formal constitutional provisions
and the actual federal practice could be explained by socio-economic characteristic of
societies: while some societies are truly “federal,” others apparently are not. As
Livingston summarized, "federalism is a function not of constitutions but of societies."
Riker’s theory advanced this approach further by suggesting that actual practice of
federalism is a function of what transpires in political competition (which, of course, in
Convention