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Review: Federalism and Territorial Cleavages

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
AuthorFrançois-Pierre Gingras
Date01 December 2005
DOI10.1177/002070200506000422
Published date01 December 2005
Subject MatterReview
AUTUMN 2005.qxd | Reviews |
F E D E R A L I S M A N D T E R R I T O R I A L C L E AVA G E S
Edited by Ugo M. Amoretti and Nancy Bermeo
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xiv, 498pp, US$55.00
cloth (ISBN 0-8018-7408-4)
Ugo M. Amoretti’s original question was whether regional cleavages in
Italy—always a hot issue in the electoral politics of the peninsula—would be
better accommodated by federalism than by the unitary state structure estab-
lished when the country was unified almost 150 years ago. When he teamed
up with Princeton’s Nancy Bermeo, who had a long-standing interest in the
political effects of institutions, and mobilized 17 other authors, associated
with universities in 10 countries, the objective became to better understand
“why some territorial cleavages are more easily accommodated than others”
and to what extent accommodation “is facilitated by federal state structures”
(2).
This collection of original essays is not limited to federations, as it
includes countries with a strong unitary character as a basis for comparison.
It begins with seven case studies of advanced industrial democracies
(Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, Spain, Britain, Italy, France), followed by
two chapters on post-communist regimes (Russia and a comparative analy-
sis of Eastern Europe), four case studies of developing democracies (India,
Nigeria, Mexico, Turkey), a chapter on electoral rules and party systems in
federations, a chapter on the analytical and moral levels of the relationships
among political liberalism, national pluralism, and democratic federalism,
and a chapter arguing that US-style symmetrical federalism would be inap-
propriate for many democratizing countries, especially multinational polities.
Territorially dispersed minorities, such as First Nations in Canada,
blacks in the US, Turks in the Netherlands, and the Roma in eastern and cen-
tral Europe, do not fall within the scope of this book. The focus is indeed on
territorial cleavages, presented by Amoretti as “today’s main source of...

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