Constitutional reform is an intrinsically difficult business, and particularly so when it concerns territorial allocation of power in federal or devolved systems. Not only do the normal array of social, economic, and political actors participate, but territorial governments themselves, often established in previous reform rounds, are also now a part of the process. In this book, Arthur Benz surveys the experience of federal and regionalized or devolved systems of government. Breaking with older legalistic distinctions, he treats meso-level governments as a single category, with a focus on the territorial distribution of power.
There have been many theories seeking to explain the reform of territorial government and the upward and downward move of competences and power, but none really do justice to the complexity of the process or to the differing contexts of each case. Institutionalist theories find difficulty in explaining change. Actor-centred theories reduce it to power games. Territorial politics is inherently contextual, so that efforts at parsimonious explanation are doomed to fail.
Benz proposes a richer and more contextualized understanding, combining general theory with the analysis of a small number of cases: Germany, Canada, Switzerland, Austria, France, and Great Britain (that is, Scotland, Wales, and fleetingly England, where reform stalled at an early stage). Only Switzerland is presented as a case of successful reform, with Canada failing at the ratification stage, Austria deadlocked, and the others partial or ineffective. The focus is on constitutional reform as a distinct form of politics, closely connected to, but not reducible to, everyday politics.
Federal and devolved systems of government are essentially about territorial balance, but they are inherently prone to power migration upward or downward, destabilizing the constitution. Constitutions must provide a stable framework for government, but be sufficiently flexible to accommodate social, economic, and political change. Constitutional politics raises collective-action problems, veto points, ideas, interests, and institutions. It is increasingly difficult as distributive questions become entangled in constitutional negotiations. Fiscal equalization has become more contentious and fiscal pressures have increased in times of austerity. It would be easy to conclude that it can never happen. Yet it does, in different ways in different places. The book seeks to use cases to explore these dynamics.
The methodology, which involves the comparative analysis of the cases, moves between description and analysis. There is a rich body of information here, organized around a consistent set of themes. A Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is promised, but at the end, Benz concedes that given the small number of successful reforms, this would have limited explanatory power. QCA is therefore applied “as a means to structuring the comparative analysis and as a prerequisite of multidimensional classification” (p. 201). It is not clear exactly what this means, but suggests that this is not a causal analysis. Rather, the contextual factors are laid out in a comparative frame.
One factor has to do with organization, including the separation of constitutional from “normal” politics, sequencing, and the ability to move issues across arenas. The role of experts can be critical, as long as they are connected to political arenas. Where constitutional reform can be separated from redistributive politics, it is protected by a veil of ignorance so that participants do not know in advance whether they will be winners or losers. Of course, this does not mean that actors behave rationally. Benz does not mention that governments do try to second-guess how they will come out, but are sometimes wrong and work against their own interests. Changes in fiscal equalization are sometimes paid for by the federal government to avoid explicit burdens on rich regions, but of course the burden is borne by the citizens of those regions anyway, through their federal taxes.
Another factor is social differentiation, which refers to the involvement of civil society. Civil society groups have intervened, but again need to reach into the political arena in order for constitutional and legislative change to occur. Regional differentiation refers to the existence of distinct issues in different constituent units and has led to asymmetrical outcomes, notably in the United Kingdom. The political context includes a distinction between multinational and integrated states, with package deals and brokerage being easier in the latter. More might have been made of this, given that in multinational states, symbolic issues often take on great importance, as proxies for deeper questions about the foundations of sovereignty (notably in Spain and Canada). There is also a reluctance on the part of substate nationalists to settle for constitutional deals that would definitively answer questions that they would prefer to keep open.
Key factors also include party systems and changes of government. Party politics is present almost everywhere and can intersect with territorial interests. On the other hand, contrary to most accounts that emphasize parties as agents of territorial integration, Benz’s does not find that the structures of party system play an important independent role.
Constitutional politics is not limited to the negotiation of constitutional amendments. There is a further process of ratification, which may fail. Where formal, “explicit” constitutional change fails, there may be implicit change by judicial interpretation and political practice. Hence the constitutional politics continues by other means. In Canada, this has served to lower the temperature and bypass the stalled constitutional process while dealing with some of the substance.
The combination of case description and analysis is rich, and in places becomes very dense and not at all an easy read. Yet the treatment is generally convincing, and the idea of constitutional politics as a distinct activity in multilevel states proves valuable. While there is a lot in Constitutional Policy in Multilevel Government already, it could have benefited from references to recent literature on the political economy of federalism and regionalism, which points to economic factors such as territorial competition. Reference might also have been made to the literature on rescaling and state transformation (some of it from political geography), which locates territory in a broader process of social and economic change, providing another layer of explanation. Benz does avoid the tendency in many political science accounts to reduce the ontology of territory to that of socially disembedded “actors” and “institutions,” but some more reference might have been made, at least in the introduction, to the social and economic forces underlying change.
This is an empirically rich and conceptually sophisticated contribution to the literature on territorial and constitutional politics. It concludes that there is no blueprint for reform and that keeping the balance—the essence of multilevel systems—is a political art more than a science.
