ABSTRACT
Federalism is not a ready-made institutional template that can be fitted into any culturally diverse countries. The US model’s modularity in federalism is passé. As a compound polity based on a combination of shared rule (national level) and regional self-rule, federations are not easy to govern. Federalism requires considering how the two types of rule are combined, the specific weight to each to the other, the specific contexts of debating the particular institutional prescription and the political actors who genuinely believe in federalism as such and so on. This chapter provides detailed analytical description of the federal features of the constitutions of the countries under study and shows that the presence or absence of appropriateness in constitutional designs when coupled with the presence or the absence of the environmental factors (e.g., democracy; national level parties; decentralization) have been responsible for why federations have been sustained (India and Malaysia) or failed (e.g. Pakistan). Nepal’s institutional designs are both very inclusive and federal, so it is more likely to be sustained if the democratic system is sustained. Myanmar’s Constitution (2008) is yet to be operative in the federal sense of the term due to absence of congenial environmental factors.
