Institutional reforms of the territorial model in Europe and America: An analytical framework

Abstract

Most democratic federations and multilevel systems witness recurring public debates, both political and academic, about the problems, effectiveness and legitimacy of their territorial arrangements. Depending on the political, economic-budgetary or social context of the countries, different waves of reforms and change in territorial institutional policies can be observed, with proposals for institutional reform showing varying degrees of success or failure. How can we conceptualize the content and outcomes of institutional territorial reforms in federations and other multilevel systems such as the EU? Under what conditions do demands for constitutional or institutional reform of the territorial model emerge and succeed? Which explanatory approaches are most useful for understanding the similarities and differences between institutional reforms? Based on an ongoing comparative research project that deals with several countries and types of reforms, the aim of this contribution is to introduce this special issue, suggesting some conceptual elements to help understand processes of federal institutional reform in multilevel systems and the factors accounting for their contents and results. To this end, we discuss the peculiarity of these reforms as a particular type of institutional or governance policy and propose a way to measure their results by establishing several success dimensions. Moreover, through an adaptation of the Multi-Stream Framework, some hypotheses and causal mechanisms are suggested to test the influence of different factors in the emergence, content and success or failure of different episodes of reform. These cases addressed in the contributions to this special issue include various domains of the territorial model in different European parliamentary federations, Canada, Mexico, or the EU.