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This chapter begins by looking briefly at some of the overarching theoretical issues confronting the field of institutional design and the rival approaches to political engineering on which they are based. It then assesses the merits of the three most coherent models of political engineering in the contemporary world: consociationalism, centripetalism, and communalism. It concludes by assessing the empirical record of each approach in the Asia-Pacific region.

This chapter considers the basic options for the design of a democratic federation. These include how to determine the boundaries of federal provinces, how to divide legislative and administrative powers, how to represent provinces and minority groups in central institutions, and how to amend the constitution. It looks at the importance of recognizing both majority and minority identities in the constitutions of both classic nation-states and multinational states. An appendix is included on the history of Canadian attempts to solve these design and recognition problems, especially concerning the place of the French-speaking province of Quebec.

Considers the theory and practices of ‘accountability’ that are associated with liberal constitutionalism, democracy, and especially contemporary democratization. Once again, it adopts a broad temporal and spatial perspective with the result that a plurality of alternative approaches and possibilities is highlighted, and processes of accountability‐building are presented as open‐ended. The chapter argues that it is possible to have both ‘too much’ accountability and also the ‘wrong sort’. Bicameralism and impeachment are selected for particular attention.

Preventing secession is the central design challenge in a multinational federation. This chapter considers how a well-designed legal secession procedure in a federal constitution could be attractive to both majority and minority nationalists. Legalizing (or ‘domesticating’) secession the right way could, paradoxically, make secession less likely by taking away some incentives for secessionist politics. It could also provide a powerful form of symbolic recognition for a national minority. The background context of secession in international law, as well as some lessons from the history of secessionist politics and the recent ‘legalization’ of secession in Canada and Quebec are discussed.

This chapter examines the principles that liberal democrats, including liberal nationalists, should use when choosing between the constitutional and federal options discussed in the preceding chapter. Instead of envisaging a completely novel set of principles for multinational federal constitutionalism, it explores the normative resources available in some of the major theories typically used in uni-national states, including ‘classical’, ‘deliberative’, and ‘consequentialist’ theories of democracy; and ‘classical’ and ‘contractualist’ theories of constitutionalism. It argues for seven principles of recognition that would be appropriate for justifying certain design features in a multinational federal constitution.

This chapter presents some concluding thoughts from the author. It argues that institutional design, writ small, is a going concern. The gaps in the standing design leave space for improvement at the margins, but there are usually alternative improvements to be debated, and questions about what would count as an improvement. Democrats with different views can deliberate and decide together about what democracy permits or requires in particular contexts, even if they lack a full account of what democracy entails.

In the face of globalization, an international political system based on states is unable to meet daunting political challenges that confront our world. Is it possible to develop a global order that would enable more justifiable and effective rule for the world’s people? In particular, can the principles and practices of justice and representative democracy be extended, to answer this challenge, beyond the state contexts for which they were devised? This book argues that we should end our dubious romance with the nation-state in favour of a multi-form global system called Responsive Democracy. To this end, the book presents core components of (a) a theory of global justice that arises out of a critique of the influential political philosophy of John Rawls; (b) a theory of democratic representation that constitutes an alternative to the approach taken by Jurgen Habermas and his deliberative democratic followers; and (c) a theory of how political and moral ideals that are necessarily framed in abstract terms can help orient practice in messy, non-ideal conditions. Together, these three currents of this text form a novel approach to global justice and democracy. The concrete implications of this approach to constitutionalism, institutional design, and politics will be explored for four leading global institutions.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of institutional design writ small. It considers the mechanisms of democracy, and proposes mechanisms that advance four core values of democratic constitutionalism: impartiality, accountability, transparency, and deliberation. The chapter then discusses the advancement of democratic values, disagreements about democratic values, the limiting conditions for democratic mechanisms, and the feasibility constraints on democratic reform. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

This chapter uses the eighteenth-century ratification debates between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists to reflect upon competing accountability tendencies inherent in representative democracy. Both sets of authors conceived of electoral accountability mechanisms as part of a politics of control designed to manage the various gaps separating representatives from citizens. However, they had different understandings of what such a politics should entail. Counterintuitively, the Federalists believed that expanding the distances between citizens and representatives could actually enhance the accountability of government. The Anti-Federalists, by contrast, placed greater emphasis upon the pacifying effects accountability institutions can have upon citizens. They believed republican accountability depends on the active participation of diverse citizens, a form of participation that is undermined when government grows distant. Drawn together, these competing visions illustrate numerous pitfalls of institutional design and how republican appeals to accountability can be made to serve conflicting agendas. They demonstrate the need to balance the effects accountability institutions have on government with the effects they have on citizens.

We now expect to be able to fine-tune simple electoral laws to effect party systems and government stability positively, but we still need to be cautious. We should not expect to be able to tailor complex electoral laws to desired goals. In institutional design, we need to consider marginal adjustments rather than flipping to completely different electoral laws. We should consider keeping the same electoral laws for at least three elections before changing them. Political science has been an intellectual field separate from politics, but the two may now start to connect, thanks to advances in the study of electoral systems and party systems.

Differentiated integration, e.g. arising out of the flexibility provisions of the Amsterdam Treaty, is a special instance of functional asymmetry within compound political systems such as federal states or the EU. Functional asymmetry exists when central decision‐making applies unevenly across the system; the system is asymmetrical in that some of the participants (provinces, member states) exercise greater powers than others. This chapter explores when and why such an arrangement may be acceptable to participants or may even be imposed (as with admission rules for EMU). It argues that states’ attitudes towards asymmetry may be shaped (1) by economic calculation (cost/benefit), (2) by possible tendency to link economic issues with non‐economic ones (democracy, human rights), or (3) by institutional design, which may permit matching of functional asymmetries with political ones (uneven participation in central decision‐making). In all three respects, the question arises, what is fair, or reasonable? Judgements on such matters are inherently subjective, but still may be the focus of reasoned discussion identifying two possible abuses of asymmetry: privilege and exclusion.

A decade of the Lisbon strategy and of policy coordination through the OMC has produced little change in the number of households at risk of income poverty. Meanwhile the economic recession following a global financial crisis has threatened to wipe out past gains. It is against this economic background, together with a changed legal and institutional context, and a new policy context — Europe 2020 — that this chapter evaluates how to strengthen EU intervention. It cautions against assumptions that strengthening implies hardening the social OMC, either by turning to ‘hard law’ or mimicking treaty-based coordination processes. Rather, it suggests that the task for policymakers is to learn the specific lessons of a decade of experience in order to improve the institutional design of coordination processes, including adoption of ‘hybrid’ solutions. Impulses to centralize decision-making ought to be resisted.