Ideologies
Federalism
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Federalism is a political system that divides sovereign authority between a central government and constituent regional governments, each holding a constitutionally guaranteed sphere of power that the other cannot simply override, rather than devolving power as a revocable grant the way a unitary state does. Its legitimacy rests on a founding compact, typically a written constitution, that the constituent units are understood to have joined or ratified, giving federal authority a claim to serve both the union and its component parts rather than one alone. Federal-style leagues and confederations existed earlier in various forms, including the Iroquois Confederacy and the Swiss Confederation, but the Federalist Papers, the 1787 to 1788 essays by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay defending the proposed United States Constitution, gave the modern theory of a strong federal government combined with retained state sovereignty its most influential articulation. Federalism is generally positioned as a middle path between a fully unitary state, which concentrates authority centrally, and a confederation, which leaves so much sovereignty with its constituent members that the centre cannot act without their consent.
Facts
Origin YearMarks the start of serial publication of the Federalist Papers defending the proposed United States Constitution; federal-style arrangements among states or provinces existed earlier in various forms elsewhere. Founding ContextGiven its first sustained modern theoretical defense by the authors of the Federalist Papers, chiefly James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, arguing in 1787 and 1788 for a new federal constitution that divided sovereignty between a national government and the states, and put into practice as the ratified United States Constitution of 1787, the model most later federal systems have drawn on directly or by contrast. 1 Learn More
Two Sovereignties, One Compact
This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Federalism does not ask which government is supreme. It holds that neither is, within its own sphere. The idea is older than any one state: the Old Swiss Confederacy bound member communities together without erasing them, and by the mid-fourteenth century the Swiss cantons were already governing themselves this way. But the theory that gave the arrangement its modern force came out of a single, urgent argument. Essays written to defend a proposed constitution that many Americans thought asked the states to surrender too much, and collected as the Federalist Papers, argued that a federal government need not choose between serving the union and serving its parts. Each level would hold a sphere the other could not simply override, guaranteed not by the goodwill of the centre but by the founding compact itself, the written constitution the states were being asked to ratify. That compact theory, not the confederacy that came before it, is what nations from Germany to Nigeria still build on.
The Line That Doesn't Move
This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Two countries can both hand power to a region and mean entirely different things by it. The United Kingdom devolved government to Northern Ireland in 1921, then to Scotland and Wales in 1997 and to London in 1998, and each of those transfers rests on an ordinary act of Parliament, the same kind of law that created it. Parliament can, in principle, amend or repeal any of them, which is exactly what a federal constitution is built to prevent. Under federalism the division of power sits in the founding compact itself, not in a statute the centre can revisit at its convenience, so a regional government's authority is a right rather than a grant. The distinction is not academic. Spain has devolved so much authority to its regions since the late 1970s that its central government now accounts for only about a fifth of public spending, closer in practice to a federation than to a unitary state, and yet Spain remains constitutionally unitary throughout. The line between devolution and federalism is drawn not by how much power moves, but by whether the power can be called back.
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Related but distinct: federalism is a constitutional division of sovereignty between named, formally ranked levels of government, while polycentricity describes any number of formally independent, often overlapping authorities, public and private, at the SAME level, coordinating through relationships rather than a constitutional hierarchy.
Federalism was one of the Ostroms' core research subjects alongside polycentrism, distinct from it: federalism is a constitutional division of sovereignty between formally ranked levels of government, polycentrism describes any number of independent authorities at the same level (see the existing polycentric-governance to federalism edge, EntityId 7425).
Influenced
Federalism names the political theory of divided sovereignty between central and constituent governments; the federal system is its institutional expression in a constitution.
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