When Dyadic Federations Fall Apart and When they Remain Together: a Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Bipolar Federalism around the World

Niessen, Christoph;Reuchamps, Min;Dejan, Stjepanovic;Dodeigne, Jérémy;Habra, Augustin
(2018) Conference on Federalism, Democracy and National Diversity in the 21st Century — Location: Université du Québec à Montréal (31.October.2018)

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This paper studies the survival and break-up of dyadic federations around the world in light of the high potential for centrifugal pressures that comes with their bipolar federal society and institutions. By mapping the factors that are crucial for the stability in dyadic federations, the research provides a comprehensive and updated account of their institutional, geographic and economic contexts. By systematically comparing these factors with a fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis for all past and present dyadic federations around the world, it seeks to go beyond the existing single or low-n case scholarship. The results suggest that federalism is not per se a bad institutional arrangement for bipolar polities as some scholars suggested. A bipolar federal projects can succeed if geographical factors such as the territorial dispersion of the dominant groups play in its favor, and when the presence of institutional arrangements such as a proportional electoral system or a national party system either assure a fair political representation for each group or prevent polities to be conceived in exclusively sub-national terms. In turn, a bipolar federal project is likely to fail in the absence of stabilizing institutional factors like executive inclusiveness and a national party system, especially when economic resource are unequally distributed among groups and when the latter are territorially clearly separable.
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Niessen, C., Reuchamps, M., Dejan, S., Dodeigne, J., & Habra, A. (2018). When Dyadic Federations Fall Apart and When they Remain Together: a Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Bipolar Federalism around the World. Conference on Federalism, Democracy and National Diversity in the 21st Century, Université du Québec à Montréal. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/226847