The Case for Conceptual Dichotomies in Comparative Federalism: Can Political Science Learn from Comparative Constitutional Law?

Comparative federalism has offered a stable theoretical framework for classifying states according to their formal structure. However, in the last decades heterodox constitutional outcomes as in the Spanish, Italian and South African cases have put the conventional taxonomies under pressure, particularly the widely accepted unitary-federal dichotomy. This article will show that a better link between political science and legal theory is needed for improving taxonomies in comparative federalism by offering a complementary way of classifying state forms from the perspective of territorial structures. A new methodology of classifying territorial state forms, based on the distribution of rulemaking authority, is operationalized through adjusted parameters that are tested by means of a re-classification of selected countries according to a new dichotomy and to subtypes reflecting the status of territorial layers within the state.