Federal Capitals often have special statutes. Compared with member states, they often enjoy a lower degree of self-government and a lesser share in the governing of the federation. Why do actors choose such devices, and ...

Education and health policy are two of the public policies, which in Spain have been assigned to the Autonomous Communities (AC). This transfer of powers could be considered a proof for the strong “self-rule” of the AC, ...

In this chapter, after pointing out the different logics that lie behind the familiar ideas of democracy and federalism, I have dealt with the case of plurinational federal democracies. Having put forward a double criterion ...

Isaiah Berlin’s humanistic liberalism is still an influential theory and an implacable antidote against extremism and fanaticism in all their guises. The author of this article notes that one of the main contributions of ...

This paper aims to show that secession, especially if unilateral, is difficult in contexts of liberal democracy. The empirical difficulties may, however, ease the normative recognition of a right to secede. After some ...

Having lived through a bloody civil war in the 1930s followed by four decades of General Franco’s dictatorship, the Spanish state carried out a transition to a democratic system at the end of the 1970s. The 1978 Constitution ...

In this article, I firstly offer a synthesis of a brief set of analytical elements of the theory of democracy and federalism established in the recent debate which identify a number of flaws in the normative and institutional ...

This paper analyzes how the ideas and concepts of Europe have developed in Catalonia, under the conditions of a decentralizing “nation-state” (Spain) on one hand, and the European integration process on the other. It ...

In light of the existing theories about institutional change, this paper seeks to advance a common framework to understand the unfolding of decentralization and federalization in three countries: Brazil, Spain, and South ...

This paper explores an overlooked issue in the literature on federations and federalism: the relationship between federalism and democracy. Starting from the assumption that federalism per se is not enough to guarantee ...