Beyond Autonomy: Practical and Theoretical Challenges to 21st-Century Federalism

Abstract

The purpose of this book is to return to Riker's fundamental concern about the relevance of federalism in the 21st century. In order to do so, our chosen conceptual focus is to re-evaluate the idea of autonomy in both theory and practice in federal studies. A well-known key characteristic and defining feature of federalism is to combine 'self-'with 'shared rule'(Elazar 1987). For many federal scholars, the idea of 'self-rule'signifies autonomy—autonomy granted not only to territories, but also to key groups (minorities), to decide, finance and implement their own policies via their ability to exercise autonomous sovereign authority in at least some areas of jurisdiction. For Robert Dahl (1986, p. 114), the standard definition of a federal democracy is a system in which some matters are exclusively within the competence of certain local units—cantons, states, provinces—and are constitutionally beyond the scope of the authority … Show more