Abstract
The edited collection, as a classic format, is perhaps underappreciated for its important role as a vessel through which academics can push against and manipulate the boundaries of the literatures their works lie within. Their significance in this regard can, as this review aims to show, be even greater when familial collections are viewed in comparison with each other. The two collections considered here focus upon the subject of federalism.
New Directions in Federalism Studies (NDFS) introduces its collected essays by noting that ‘when addressing the relevance of federalism’, academics ‘frequently put on their hats as constitutional scholars, students of national or ethnic studies or political economists’. They have not, however, ‘developed into “federalism scholars” to the extent that, say, “party scholars” have’ (p. 11). With this in mind, the additional value claimed by this text is to be more than a selection of well-crafted analyses. Rather, it stems from the drawing together of essays by members of an identified ‘new wave of federalism studies’ (p. 1) which it seeks to illustrate and affirm (a selection made despite the fact that, as the editors themselves admit, ‘the latent commonalities’ between such ‘new wave’ works are ‘not yet manifest’ [p. 11]).
The collected pieces cover a number of topics – including electoral patterns, party politics and ethnic conflict management in federal/multi-level systems – and a number of cases, among others, Spain, Germany, the UK, Australia and Switzerland. As is usual, these analyses are topped and tailed by an introduction and conclusion by the editors. The former offers a valuable explanation of the collection's aim (see above) and background to the development of ‘federalism studies’. Here it highlights the generally comparativist nature of such contemporary studies and their debt to the growth of ‘new institutionalism’. The latter feels more like a summary of the preceding chapters than a reflexive intervention into the literature it styles itself as. However, the claim that new institutionalism faces a ‘slowdown’ as it gets ‘old’ is worth debating, as is the claim that federalism has had ‘a period of growth’ and now finds itself in ‘a period of consolidation’ (p. 205). The linked claim, moreover, that ‘[t]he existing supply of federal experiments will keep us busy for quite a while’ may signify a danger that in viewing the wave as having crested, analysts might become overly complacent. The risk of analytical complacency is already discernible in the collection's broadly shared ontological/epistemological perspective: in charting the impact of new institutionalism the introduction sticks firmly to the rationalist, positivist tradition, making no reference to the more recent discursive/ideational/constructivist (choose your favourite label) current. The analyses themselves stick mostly within this framing, looking at power in terms of ‘formal’ structures to the exclusion of ‘non-formal’ ones (ideological tendencies, normative traditions, etc.).
Perhaps, therefore, what NDFS demonstrates is not only the development of a ‘new wave of federalism studies’, but the narrowness of its present focus. It is often the case that feminist analyses are ghettoised in ‘specialist’ books. Viewed as a counterpart to NDFS, therefore, the existence of Federalism, Feminism and Multilevel Governance (FFMG) and its appreciable size/length (sixteen chapters) appears testament to just such an elision: as the book's introductory chapter notes, ‘[t]he long-established federalism literature ignores issues of gender’ (p. 1), and indeed, the terms ‘gender’ and ‘feminism’ are not even present in the previous book's index. The rationalist positivism already noted in NDFS – itself arguably unresponsive to issues of gender and exclusion – is counterpoised in this text by a stress upon institutions, practices, discourses and language (p. 1). The essays herein again cover a number of topics, mixing issues of governance, intra-institutional relations and multi-level power structures (discussed in the other collection) with those of childcare advocacy, women's urban safety, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) and reproductive rights (which are entirely missing there).
The analyses are divided into three parts which mix the spatial with the temporal: ‘Older Federations: Australia, Canada, United States’; ‘Europe: Germany, Russia, the UK’; and ‘Newer Federations: India, Mexico, Nigeria’. These parts – of which, in terms of content judged per word, the ‘Older’ federations do best and Europe worst – are framed within two strong, substantive introductory chapters and a conclusion that is summative but also agenda setting. The second introductory chapter by Gwendolyn Gray is particularly valuable; while the first introductory chapter gives a basic rundown of the federalist, multi-level governance and devolution literatures and key issues, Gray's chapter complements and extends the former issue but goes further in setting out the feminist critique of non-gendered analysis and theory-building efforts in federalism studies.
These are both books that university libraries should stock. NDFS is clearly the collection with the broadest scope, but ‘the new wave’ – if it does exist as a tangible epistemic entity – should be forced to take on the broad lessons raised in FFMG also. Such an engagement would be to the benefit of all.