ABSTRACT
Introduction Democracy is the cutting edge of federalism, understood as an institutional space for political accommodation for diversity. Alfred Stepan, a leading scholar of the comparative politics of our times, believes that although the majority of people worldwide who live in democracies live in federal systems, the relation between democracy and federalism remains still largely neglected theoretically.1 The very concept of federalism as a political principle that advocates a combination of shared-and self-rule implies that democracy better provides the basis for the legitimacy of such a combination. Watts (1999) has emphasized the ‘representativeness’ of federal institutions in order to ‘minimize the ‘democratic deficit’ and technocracy’ in the system.2 Many years ago, K. C. Wheare (1953) wanted to see federalism as a way of reconciling the pressures for diversity and for unity, so that diversity is maintained as a value in itself (Wheare 1953: 245-246). At the same time, Wheare emphasized the (democratic) similarity of political institutions for the sake of federalism, and hence for the sake of diversity. He cited the example of how the successful transformation of the Swiss Confederation (1291-1848) into a federal union in 1848 required that the ‘great divergence of political institutions in the cantons’ (oligarchies, a monarchy, aristocracies and democracies) was brought ‘into line’ (Wheare 1953: 46). The conclusion that he drew from the Swiss success is worth quoting here:
A condition of the closer union which federation required was similarity of political institutions and after a hard struggle the democratic and republican cantons prevailed and all were brought into line. There seems little doubt that just as the desire to form a federal union is unlikely to arise among states which differed in regime, the capacity to form and work such a union can hardly exist without substantial similarity.
