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Putin’s reform of the Russian Federation can be viewed as both promoting and restricting democracy. While moves to challenge the democracy of Russia’s regions can be seen as a positive step, considerable doubts remain about whether the reforms involved gains in terms of democracy and effectiveness. Beyond increased stability, there is little evidence that the regional reforms fundamentally altered the networks of political and economic relationships that underpinned regional activism and the non-democratic regimes of many regions in the 1990s.

This concluding chapter elaborates on the theoretical implications of the study for institutional theory as well as on its practical implications for the likelihood of successful federal reform. In a final step, it applies the theoretical arguments of the book to the European Union and explores whether the mechanisms through which policies are coordinated within this supranational setting can be accounted for by the proposed 'federalism framework'. Being composed of power-concentrating governments and governments with voluntary power-sharing on the level of the member states and characterized by compulsory power-sharing on the European level, the European Union mixes incentive structure within and across governmental levels. Contrasted with the three federal systems, the framework's application reveals parallels and peculiarities of the European polity in how the governments embedded in it handle demands for intergovernmental cooperation. While only a rough sketch, it indicates the fruitfulness of applying federalism frameworks beyond the national sphere and highlights the importance of avoiding the perception of the European Union as 'sui generic' from the outset.

This chapter argues that the interplay of institutionalization and integration of intergovernmental arrangements affects the precision, the substantial depth and function of informal intergovernmental agreements which, in turn, affects the effectiveness of intergovernmental cooperation. It comparatively assesses non-binding intergovernmental agreements issued in 2004 and 2005 by both generalist and policy-specific arrangements in Canada, Switzerland, and the United States. The findings indicate that intragovernmental dynamics simultaneously affect the set-up of arrangements and nature of agreements. While institutionalization has a direct impact on agreements as well, the findings imply that it matters most in those contexts where the intragovernmental incentives are favourable towards strong arrangements in the first place. Federal reforms – as far as reforms are supposed to counteract dominant intragovernmental incentive structures – are unlikely to have a strong impact in intergovernmental cooperation.

This book emphasizes the enduring tension between Americans' yearning for national leadership and their celebration of political pluralism and local control, illustrating the consequences of this conflict for social policymaking in the United States. This introductory chapter first discusses the place of education policy in American political development, and two approaches to the study of institutional development. It then explains the concept of institutionally bounded entrepreneurship, which illustrates how entrepreneurs and institutions interact to produce bounded, ongoing institutional change. Next, it uncovers the institutionally bounded entrepreneurship of business leaders and civil rights activists by placing these actors in the context of some of the most important issues and interests that are involved in the contemporary debate over elementary and secondary education. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

For large countries, an agenda of economic integration, deregulation and natural resource management reform typically cannot be effectively pursued without the active participation of subnational governments. While most of the literature about federalism and reform is about the reform of federalism, this volume is about reform through federalism. It explores federal reform strategies, that is, ways in which central governments can motivate, incentivise, influence and ensure coordination of subnational policies. It covers such mechanisms as the imposition of conditions on specific-purpose grants to subnational governments, the provision of grants if certain reforms are undertaken, the development of cross-government agreements, and the centralization of power from subnational to the central government. By exploring a range of case-studies, drawn mainly from India and Australia but also covering Indonesia and China, it fills the existing gap in the literature relating to federal reform strategies. This overview provides a conceptual framework, including a typology of strategies, summarizes the case-studies, and draws out some lessons learnt.

After reviewing some of the existing typologies of federal institutional arrangements and their shortcoming, this chapter presents a fourfold multidimensional typology of varieties of federalism, drawing on some of the established typologies as well as on two main measurable dimensions of variation, namely the configuration of formal institutional arrangements and the working relationships between actors within federal systems. After that, it proposes several factors that are related to the varieties of federalism and describe their hypothetical effects on the propensities for change and reform, seeking to posit some causal mechanisms by which they have an impact. This variation is supposed to account for the variation in the dynamics of institutional change in federations.

Although Australia’s modern reform era began with the election of the Hawke Government in 1983, it was not till the National Competition Policy (NCP) which ran from 1995 to 2005, that a collaborative reform effort emerged between the central and state governments. The subsequent period, covers the National Reform Agenda (NRA) which was aborted after a couple of years and the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) Reform Agenda which is currently under implementation. The interim assessment of the COAG Reform Agenda contained in this chapter identifies several problems. Its main conclusion is that that for cooperative federal reform efforts to work there has to be a basis for cooperation, namely buy-in to an agreed solution to the identified problem. Unfortunately, this seems to be missing from much of the COAG Reform Agenda. As long as that remains the case, progress is likely to be slow and tortuous.

This chapter describes the structure of American education policy up to 1980. Between the 1950s and the end of the 1970s, both the federal government and the states developed new programs and regulations designed to assist historically disadvantaged groups, impinging in important ways on the authority of lower-level government. These policies were supported by an array of civil rights groups, educational interest groups, and state education bureaucrats, as well as by elected officials who gained politically from channeling new educational resources to their districts. Nonetheless, while the federal and the state roles in education grew notably during this period, the responsibilities of governments at both levels remained quite limited. Responsibility for the “regular school program” serving most students remained lodged in local school districts and schools.

This paper seeks to identify patterns of inter-state and centre-state interactions that condition the processes and outcomes of governance reform in Indian federal polity. Centralizing federalism offers examples of failures as well as successes. Intergovernmental competition can activate reforms as seen in Bihar and Gujarat, and that may also motivate reforms in other states. The central government should actively support competitive federalism through parallel reform processes, incorporate successful state initiatives into national programs, foster incentives for states to persist with reform through financial support packages, and encourage states to learn from one another. The paper argues that India needs to move towards a cooperative federalism that allows for genuine reform to occur, as in the case of the Right to Information Act, but which avoids the dilution that a consensus-based solution can entail. In this model, the central government would nudge states in the right direction using the wide array of instruments and create cooperative processes to formulate reforms.

This chapter recaps the efforts of federal educational reform in Alexandria, a. Looking across policy domains, arguing that the successful construction of the federal schoolhouse depends in significant part on the alignment of between local regime characteristics and the demands of federal policy innovations. The second half of the chapter turns to the implications of the arguments about the construction of the education state. It also considers overall cross-policy comparisons. These findings hold implications for several audiences: t mainly those within the educational policy field; political scientists who study the nature of both education politics and US state and American political development; and the students, families, teachers, and elected and educational officials in Alexandria.

On April 20, 2006, Latinos in North Carolina joined thousands of people in an organized march to show support for comprehensive immigration reform being considered in Congress. When federal immigration reform failed at the end of 2006, the public was left with the realization that the U.S. immigration system has no clear plan for dealing with undocumented immigrants. To understand how demographic change is affecting North Carolina communities, this book has three goals: (1) to create a bigger picture of the transnational processes that involved migration; (2) to present the stories of Latinos in North Carolina; and (3) to consider the consequences of how native communities respond to demographic change.

This chapter gathers evidence on the process by which crop insurance programs are created and uses this evidence to estimate the supply of crop insurance programs across counties, crops, and years. An administrative rule that gives priority to crops with the highest ranking value has considerable predictive power, though crop- and county-specific variables also play an important role. The estimates regarding the effects of crop insurance on the supply of and demand for insured crops indicate that effects differ for tree and non tree crops, perhaps as a consequence of the much larger investments at risk in crops of the former type.

This chapter develops and analyzes a new structural model of variable input use, production, acreage allocations, capital investment, and consumption choices in the U.S. farm sector. The theoretical framework identifies and incorporates the restrictions that are necessary and sufficient to estimate variable input use using only observable data and to aggregate from micro units of behavior to county-, state-, region-, or country-levels of data and analyses. The chapter defines, specifies, and estimates a dynamic life-cycle model of decision making under risk in order to discipline the model and associated parameter estimates for risk aversion in agricultural production and investment decisions with the interactions that naturally occur among the available alternative investment and savings opportunities in the economy.