Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This thesis focuses on federalism and ethnic diversity. Using two case studies. / South Africa

This thesis discusses the governmental institutional dynamics that structure the formulation and coordination of spatial policy within the federal Canadian intergovernmental system and presents methods to improve it. The research utilises the three traditions of new institutionalism - historical, rational choice and sociological - to develop a crosscutting assessment of intergovernmental spatial policy coordination. An embedded case study approach is then used to discuss intergovernmental spatial policy coordination between the governments of Canada, British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan. Research findings highlight the uniqueness of the institutional environments that exist within each government, and to a lesser extent each department, which structure policymakers’ understandings of intergovernmental spatial policy coordination. Policymakers demonstrate a distinct awareness of spatial issues, but they are often constrained in their ability formally to articulate this in the development of public policy, particularly in relation to intergovernmental interactions. The decentralised federal nature of Canada is shown to be a highly influential reason for this, with issues of history, equity, politics and strong regional government cultures playing important roles in impeding intergovernmental spatial policy coordination. The thesis explores these constraints, discussing how both formal and informal institutional structures interact to discourage the use of spatial policy, and discusses the ways in which intergovernmental spatial policy coordination could be enhanced in the specific context of Canada. The institutional framework developed in this research is shown to be a useful method for conceptualising the competing federal principles of unity and diversity in the study of intergovernmental spatial policy coordination. Ultimately this thesis argues that while intergovernmental spatial policy coordination is poorly developed in Canada, policymaker awareness of spatial issues influences the decision-making processes employed to develop and coordinate public policy.

Doctor Legum - LLD / South Africa continues to experience one of the highest crime rates in the world. Crime is unevenly distributed, and the police are not trusted by the majority of citizens. The power and responsibility for policing lies with the national government, through South Africa’s negotiated constitutional framework. Only a limited form of policing under local government, severely constrained by onerous requirements, is permitted in the legislative framework. Such centralisation of policing in federal states is theorised to be necessary to avoid partisan policing and armed separatism; to prevent local capture of police by local politicians; to ensure uniformity, equity and democratic change, and to ensure equitable outcomes; and to bring efficiencies of scale to policing.

Foreign policy has generally speaking been the traditional ‘responsibility of national governments’. This is particularly true of states with unitary systems of governments but is less true in federalist states.Federalist states are states which have adopted a system of government whereby ‘powers are divided and shared between constituent governments and a general government having certain nation-wide’ responsibilities’. Federalism is often adopted by pluralistic societies to ensure a system of uniformity while accommodating differences and to maintain national security and economic unity. By their nature, federalist states share responsibilities and powers between the central and constituent units. / Thesis (LLM (Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa)) -- University of Pretoria, 2010. / A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Law University of Pretoria, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Masters of Law (LLM in Human Rights and Democratisation in Africa). Prepared under the supervision of Prof. Nico Steytler, Faculty of Law, University of Western Cape, South Africa. 2010 / http://www.chr.up.ac.za/ / Centre for Human Rights / LLM

This dissertation provides the first critical account of modernism as a constitutional culture. I explore how key Anglophone modernists responded to the emergence of federal governance as a national norm and international ideal, with particular focus on the movement for British imperial federation and the forms of postcolonial governance it influenced during the twentieth century. Intervening in recent methodological debates over the social effects of literary form, I develop an interdisciplinary analysis of literature's relationship to informal constitutional change and write literary history as alternative constitutional history. Through close reading and original historical and archival research, I show how writers incorporated federalism's logic of plural perspectives and distributed sovereignty while also registering unacknowledged forms of racial apartheid, or what Edward Kamau Brathwaite calls “negative federation.” By identifying modernist fiction’s critical relationship to liberal federalism, I argue that modernism’s distinctive formal disruptions mediated the changing constitutional form of states across the Anglophone world. My introduction surveys the Anglo-American discourse of federation and defines the study’s central concepts of racial capitalism, modernist formal decadence, and informal constitutional change. Chapter one explores ways in which Oscar Wilde's study of political philosophy and his 1882 visit to the southern United States influenced his critical views on imperial federation and his development of the gothic Bildungsroman as a means of portraying metropolitan constitutional corruption. Chapter two places Virginia Woolf's novels on the timeline of constitutional reforms that prolonged British rule in India, demonstrating that her characters' identity crises and her invention of a style of modernist national biography reflected attempts to redefine the Empire as a quasi-federal Commonwealth. Chapter three analyzes the historical and romance elements in William Faulkner’s fiction, arguing that his attention to liberal federalism’s economic foundations produces a collection of constitutional apocrypha that disrupts the perspectives and assumptions of white supremacy. The conclusion sketches liberal federalism’s postcolonial trajectories through case studies of Joseph Conrad, Jean Rhys, Claude McKay, Ralph Ellison, and Salman Rushdie. The narratives I examine indicate modernist fiction’s ability to amplify what modern political theory refers to as “constituent power”: the disruptive influence of subjects who have been excluded from the liberal state’s formally constituted power.

In Post-Soviet Russia new federal model was established in a very short time. It negatively influenced its future functioning. With the aim of precluding the secessionism of certain federal subjects, government decided to solve this situation by signing special bilateral agreements with part of them. Those agreements were breaching Russian Constitution adopted in 1993 but on the other hand, they brought a desired stability to the whole country. In my thesis I described a legal model of the federal arrangement and observed the differences between legal theory and practice, based on the agreements, mentioned above. Vladimir Putin, who became Russian president in 2000, started to reform federal system significantly. The main pillar of the reform was comprised by a bunch of federal laws adopted predominantly at the beginning of his presidency. Those laws were created in order to revise the advantages which were given to regions in the bilateral agreements. Legal theory and practice came closer together again. Is it possible to say that Russia set out on the journey of rule of law? My thesis will describe this development from the legal point of view. As the case study on which I want to demonstrate my conclusions I chose the Republic of Tatarstan.

Competing narratives on the “rise and fall of multiculturalism” (Kymlicka 2010) confuse our understanding of the evolution of multiculturalism policy, particularly in the case of federations like Canada and Australia. Part of the issue is the sharp separation between stability and change and prevailing focus on national multiculturalism policies. This overlooks important and simultaneous developments in the constituent units of these two federations. We therefore ask how and why have multiculturalism policies changed in the constituent units of Australia and Canada? First, we argue that amid a noticeable decline in support for multiculturalism on the part of the central government in both countries, constituent unit governments have become a crucial source of multiculturalism policy development in Australia and Canada. Because many of the economic, labour, civil rights and social policy challenges involve state/provincial or shared responsibilities, multiculturalism policies are developed and implemented in large part by constituent units. Thus, we cannot comment on multiculturalism policies in federations without paying attention to the experiences and contributions of constituent units. Second, we argue this process of multiculturalism policy change can be conceptualized along four modes of gradual institutional change referred to as policy drift, layering, displacement, and conversion. These incremental modes of policy change are the result of a distinct combination of contextual, structural, and agency-based factors. More precisely, (1) a shift in the socio-political context marks the opening of a critical juncture as new ideas and demands for reform emerge; (2) institutional rules with separate compliance and enforcement standards structure reform pathways; and (3) the relationship between policy and political entrepreneurship activates the causal mechanisms that consolidate the separate modes of gradual institutional change. The dissertation therefore offers a more complete theoretical explanation of the processes of institutional change, their ideational influences and causal mechanisms through fresh empirical observation. Building on Mahoney and Thelen’s (2010) theory on gradual institutional change, the dissertation applies a process-tracing method over the period 1989 to 2019 to four case studies: Nova Scotia, South Australia, New South Wales, and British Columbia. In sum, generating inquiry that looks beyond national policies allows us to capture concurrent processes happening within and across State/provincial boundaries, which in turn shape their shared citizenship.

No description available.

Putin's military forces invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, sparking a renewed academic interest in Russia's current regime. Several scholars suggested that a critical period in the construction of the current regime occurred between 1999-2013 during Putin's first two presidencies followed by the Medvedev presidency. This is when the basic institutions of the current Russian political system were changed to recentralize state authority and prevent Russian Federation from looming disintegration. One such institution was the budgetary process. Signed into law in 1998, Russian Budget Code established how funds were disbursed from the "center" to the federal "subjects" and other entities. Many scholars have pointed out that one specific mechanism, namely "Intergovernmental Transfers", can be used to achieve the political goals of a regime by rewarding supporters, swinging the competitive electoral districts, or appeasing the opposition or separatist regions. The goal of this dissertation to investigate under what conditions a non-democratic regime, like Russia, uses these strategies for political effect? Do those strategies change over time? In this work, I develop a basic theoretical framework outlining such conditions and test it using the municipal-level data gathered from the Russian Federal State Statistics Service and Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation.

Understanding the influence of interest groups in the public policy process is vital to comprehending how public policy is created and implemented. This dissertation analyzes the influence of interest groups on the states that were involved with the negotiations of two river basin interstate compacts in the Southeastern United States. The compacts originated when the downstream states of Alabama and Florida became concerned about the amount of water the metropolitan area of Atlanta was withdrawing from the Chattahoochee River. This study considers which interest groups were most influential in formulating each state?s position during the negotiation process. While literature exists in the study of river basin interstate compacts in the western states, a gap in the literature concerning water policy in the Southeastern United States is filled by this study. This dissertation considers the Western compacts and explores the similarities and differences between the compacts negotiated in the Southeast within the context of the public policy process. Federalism is explored not only with the states but with agencies from the federal government and their role in the compact negotiation process. The relationship between the federal agencies and the states sets the stage in which the policy process is conducted. The data were collected using a mixed methods approach of in-depth interviews and a survey. The interview subjects included individuals intimately involved with the negotiation process. The survey respondents were individuals who possessed at least a passing awareness of the compacts and how they would affect their jobs, organizations, or constituents. Final analysis concludes that several interest groups were able to wield enough power to influence not only their state, but also the entire negotiation process. The influence exerted by some of the interest groups prevented the compacts from existing beyond the negotiation period. As a result, the compacts expired and the states have resorted to the federal courts in search of a ruling on allocating water. The lack of formal federal involvement as well as involvement of a neutral party in the negotiation process are also vital to explaining why the compacts expired.