Nicole Taylor and Dr. Joel Selway, Department of Political Science
Comparative politics, the study of government structures around the world, is a relatively new field, and the study of federalism is even more recent. Studies are typically conducted by selecting two or three countries and comparing their government structures using qualitative measures or by studying a large sample using statistical analysis. Authors who study federalism have been limited to qualitative analysis by the lack of a dataset of federal systems.
Federalism is a government that is subdivided into regional entities or units. This is familiar to Americans as the United States is the original modern federal system. In the United States, the state governments act as individual units, all unified by the central government. Most countries are unitary, meaning there are no unit or state governments, only the central government. Federalism allows each of the units to act semi-independently of each other. For example, education policy is very different in the 50 United States. Exceptionally good policies might be adopted by other units. Because of this ability to tailor policies to a specific region, federal systems could be better at some things than unitary governments. However, in some situations federalism might only fuel the problem, such as when Ethiopia made Eritrea a state. This only fueled the ethnic and cultural divide between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Soon after Eritrea seceded
and became its own country.
This project was to create a dataset cataloguing all the federal systems and federacies (a unitary government that has one region that retains some independence such as the United States relationship with American Samoa) by reading and coding constitutions. Each country is catalogued beginning from either the 1940s or when it first became a federal system until 2012. Variables include whether or not the country has an upper house that represents the units, states
rights, and regional taxation policy. After more than four months of hard work, this completed dataset has nearly 3000 rows of data summarizing 60 countries. It currently is the most comprehensive and detailed dataset on federal countries.
This data has many potential uses in research. Originally, it was designed to test if federal systems have higher rates of economic growth than unitary governments. In order to test this, the federalism dataset can be combined with other comprehensive datasets that have variables for a wide range of information sources such as GDP, electoral systems, and legislative bodies. The federalism dataset has been designed to fit like a puzzle piece to Professor Matt Golder’s
Democratic Electoral Systems Around the World, 1946-2000.
After Dr. Selway and I publish a summary paper on our findings, the federalism data will be published on my personal website for anyone to download. Researchers will then be able to use the data in anyway they feel pertinent. Eventually, I hope to use the data to help explain ethnic tensions and provide possible solutions for countries experiencing problems with regionalized ethnic groups.
References
- Golder, Matt. 2005. Democratic Electoral Systems Around the World, 1946-2000. Dataverse.(https://files.nyu.edu/mrg217/public/elections.html).