Differences and commonalities between authoritarian and liberal federations

Hypothesis 2

Testing Hypothesis 2 for the sufficient conditions: Authoritarian federations do not provide the regional equality while liberal ones do (equality of representation in the Parliament, asymmetry in political, administrative or fiscal spheres)

The truth table (see Table 21) below presents the configuration of the presence of the equality of representation and the absence of asymmetry as sufficient to the positive democratic outcome. It describe four liberal democratic federations that are Austria, Germany, Switzerland and the United States.

According to two tables below, the democratic federal states have the high level of equality of representation in a Parliament, however, authoritarian federations do not (see Table 12, 13). Asymmetry is also represented only in authoritarian federations. However, the solution coverage and consistency together does not present a sufficient configuration of sets, that is why it is not really appropriate to make the conclusions in a sense of absence/presence of these two conditions in democratic weather authoritarian states. They are different in all cases.

Table 21. Hypothesis 2: truth table for the positive outcome

Table 22. Hypothesis 2: intermediate solution formula for the positive outcome

Note: Cases with greater than 0.5 membership in term eq_repr_w*~asy_w: Austria (1,1), Germany (1,1), United States (1,1), Switzerland (0.67,1)

Table 23. Hypothesis 2: intermediate solution formula for the negative outcome

Note: Cases with greater than 0.5 membership in term ~eq_repr_w: Argentina (1,1), Bosnia and Herzegovina (1,0.67), Brazil (1,0.67), Comoros (1,0.33), Iraq (1,0.33), Malaysia (1,0.67), Micronesia (1,1), Nigeria (1,0.33), Pakistan (1,0.33), Russia (1,0), South Sudan (1,0), United Arab Emirates (1,0), Venezuela (1,0), South Africa (1,1); Cases with greater than 0.5 membership in term asy_w: Australia (1,1), Belgium (1,1), Bosnia and Herzegovina (1,0.67), Canada (1,1), Ethiopia (1,0), India (1,0.67), Iraq (1,0.33), Malaysia (1,0.67), Mexico (1,0.67), Nigeria (1,0.33), Pakistan (1,0.33), Russia (1,0), United Arab Emirates (1,0), Venezuela (1,0)

The qualitative comparative analysis of differences and commonalties between authoritarian and democratic federation fully proved main hypothesis and rejected hypotheses number 1 and 2. Overall results showed that authoritarian and liberal federations really have the same federal structure but they are different in how this structure works. The lack of robust configurations at the level of comparing descriptive conditions for democratic and authoritarian federations nevertheless did not give clear conclusions about what exactly the difference between authoritarian and liberal federations consists of, but it has shown that all federations have a wide spread of various conditions in which they exist. Further analysis of authoritarian and democratic federations will require a deeper analysis within both groups in order to really understand the key differences in the work of federal institutions not only between these two groups, but also within each of them.

Conclusion

To sum up, we have described the theoretical framework for the federal theory and the federation's nature. The federalism and a federation are controversial concepts today. There are many approaches to their conceptualizations that describe different federal features that should exist in such systems. Moving further, we theoretically proved the unclear issue of authoritarian federalism existence and generally described and chose the approach to the political regime conceptualization and operationalization. Theoretically, we investigated that authoritarian federalism can potentially exist. Some authoritarian states are federations and have a federal institutional structure, but these institutions can work in a way to create a stability for non-liberal regimes. Despite this fact, we found out that there is a lack of research on that issue and it is not really clear what principle differences liberal and authoritarian federations have. As a result, we have used federal features that were studied in federalism theoretical approaches as structural and descriptive conditions for the qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) of authoritarian and democratic federations.

The QCA method was chosen because it assumes the studying of small number of cases with the modelling of configurations of different conditions Schneider and Grofman, "It might look like a regression equation… but its not! An intuitive approach to the presentation of QCA and fs/QCA results", 10. what in the case of study of 24 de jure federations is the best methodological solution. In accordance with the federal theory and the existing theory of authoritarian federalism, we put forward one main and two additional hypotheses for more robust tests in comparison of federal descriptive conditions in authoritarian and democratic federations. The main hypothesis suggested that authoritarian and democratic federations have the same structural elements, but differ in the nature of their work. Testing of this hypothesis was divided into two parts: an analysis of structural conditions and an analysis of descriptive conditions.

The test for the necessary structural conditions showed that all federations have the written federal contract that guarantee the administrative autonomy, territorial division of a state for the federal sub-units as well as the direct simultaneous control of two levels of power over them. To understand why two other structural conditions were not included in this list, we also conducted a sufficiency test for structural conditions. It showed that the bicameral system (shared-rule) or/and the political autonomy are missing conditions for eight federal states of different political regimes. The only state that does not have two of these conditions is the United Arab Emirates. In this sense, we would like to raise the question that, theoretically, this state is not federal, because at the structural level it is different from the rest of the states we have studied. United Arab Emirates exercises full political control over the territory due to its unique structure what is more reminiscent of a unitary state.

The test for the necessary descriptive conditions showed that there are no any of them none in authoritarian or democratic federations. The sufficiency test showed the robust configurations for the democratic federations; however it did not show them for the authoritarian ones. If we look at the truth table, we will see the huge dispersion of them in different configurations. That is the reason why we have decided to test two other hypotheses in relation to the descriptive conditions. The first hypothesis suggests that authoritarian federations are more centralized than democratic ones. Since the test for the necessary conditions has already been completed, we did not repeat it for the three types of centralization. The sufficiency test showed that there are no configurations of conditions that could robustly explain both democratic and autocratic federations. The truth table with the huge dispersion of cases of different outcomes proves that fact. It means that, overall, authoritarian and democratic federations are not different and not similar in accordance to the state centralization in administrative, fiscal and political fields.

The second hypothesis suggested that democratic federations contribute to the equal representation of regions in the political federal system, while authoritarian ones do not. As a result, we found out that the configuration of equal representation of regions in parliament and the absence of regional asymmetry are absolute conditions for describing democratic federations. However, it has the low level of robustness as it explains a small number of cases. At the same time, other configurations can be used to explain any types of federations. It means that authoritarian and democratic federations are not different or similar in a sense of regional representation and equality. Overall results show that democratic and authoritarian federations are really similar having the same federal structure. However all federal states, even within the framework of democratic and authoritarian regimes, differ from each other in how the federal system works. It means that in general authoritarian and democratic federations are different from each other in a sense of the characteristic of the federal institutional structure.

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Empirical base

1. Freedom House. “Countries and territories.” 2019

2. Forum of Federations

3. Constitution of Saint Kitts and Nevis, 10 September 1983

4. Interim National. Constitution of the Republic of the Sudan (Amendment) (2015)

5. The Constitution Of Nepal, as Amended by the First, Second, and Third Amendments of the Constitution. Kathmandu, Nepal :His Majesty's Govt. of Nepal, Ministry of Law and Justice, Law Books Management Committee, 1981

6. Myanmar's Constitution of 2008, 29 May 2008

7. Constitution of the Republic of South Africa of 1996, Act 200 of 1993

8. Constitution of the Republic of Argentina of 1853, Washington: Pan American Union. Australia, 1960

9. Constitution of the Federal Republic of Austria, 1930, amended 2019

10. Constitution of the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 18 March 1994,

11. Constitution of Brazil, 5 October 1988

12. Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act, 9 July 1900

13. The Belgium Constitution, 17 February 1994

14. Canada's Constitution of 1867 with Amendments through 2011, 29 March 1867

15. Comoros's Constitution of 2001 with Amendments through 2009, 23 December 2001

16. Constitution of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia 1994. Addis Ababa 1995, December 8

17. Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, 23 May 1949

18. The Constitution of India, 26 January 1950

19. Constitution of the Republic of Iraq, 15 October 2005

20. Federal Constitution of Malaysia, 31 August 1957

21. Mexico Constitution of the United Mexican States, 5 February 1917

22. Constitution of the Federated States of Micronesia, 1 October 1978

23. Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 5 May 1999

24. The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, 14 August 1973

25. Constitution of the Russian Federation, 23 December 1993

26. The Transitional Constitution of the Republic of South Sudan of 2011, 26 February 2013, Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation, 18 April 1999

27. United Arab Emirates: Constitution, 2 December 1971

28. United States of America: Constitution, 17 September 1787

29. Constitution of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, 16 January 1961

Appendix 1

Fiscal centralization

Appendix 2

Administrative centralization

Appendix 3

Political centralization

Appendix 4

Collected data

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