New Structuralism and Institutional Change: Federalism Between Centralization and Decentralization

Abstract

This article aims to contribute to the debate on institutional change by introducing social structure as the basis for theorizing about the direction of such change. The empirical context is the long-term trends of federal institutional change in the federations of the industrialized West (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States). It is the authors' contention that institutions change in order to reach a better fit with the underlying linguistic structure. The direction for institutional change in federal systems with territorially based linguistic heterogeneity is decentralizing, for homogeneous ones the direction is centralizing. The argument is based on the growing importance of language as the provider of democratic space. It is through the less formalized interest group politics that the underlying linguistic base finds its way into influencing the direction of institutional change.

National party structure in parliamentary federations: subcontracting electoral mobilisation in Canada and Australia

“…The resilience of similar patterns of party organisation over a century of dramatic political change can be seen as a challenge to the argument of those who follow in the tradition of Livingston (1952) and rely on the dominance of sociological or socio-linguistic forces in shaping the federal process (Erk, 2011;Erk & Koning, 2010). In a similar fashion, while there may be marked differences in some measures of subnational policy autonomy and public finance between Canada and Australia (Thorlakson, 2003), these appear to have had only a limited effect on the operation of the major national parties in the two federations.…”

Differences That Matter: Overcoming Methodological Nationalism in Comparative Social Policy Research

“…Fourth, the endogeneity problem that afflicts all studies of territorial politics means that it is hard to see, at the state level, whether welfare state effort is a property of institutions, or whether both welfare state effort and institutions are effects of deeper social structures (Rodden 2004;Erk and Koning 2009). Insofar as the fragmentation runs deeper than the institutional level, there is a good chance that these structures are territorially differentiated and would be revealed in a territorially sensitive analysis, as studies have indeed found (Linz and de Miguel 1966;Snyder 2001).…”

Political Elites and Decentralization Reforms in the Post-Socialist Balkans

“…There is a vast literature on the traditional federal or regionalized states in the western hemisphere (de Winter and Türsan 1998;Keating 2003a;Swenden 2006;Erk and Koning 2010;Hooghe et al 2010), but very few detailed studies on decentralized states in other parts of the world. By now we know much about the reasons why federal systems vary across the globe, but we have much less to say about the variation between the myriad of unitary states that have some form of decentralized powers short of federations (Hooghe and Marks forthcoming).…”