Representative Democracy as a Necessary Condition for the Survival of a Federal Constitution

It does not follow from the supposition that the union is beneficial that its terms would go unchallenged by its members. The argument in this article suggests that federal stability (robustness) requires for itself a well-functioning democratic process, which satisfies a fairly restrictive condition. A necessary condition for the resiliency of the federal regime is a representative democracy; furthermore, it is the representative democracy in which rewards to the representatives are only in part vested in their parochial constituencies, while in the other part come form other sources, e.g., from an oversized at-large coalition. The requirement to the democratic process is, of course, only a necessary, not a sufficient condition for the federal success. Yet, we argue in this essay that only the states with well-developed (properly institutionalized) democratic electoral competition have a chance to form a resilient federal union and sustain their federal constitutional arrangements not just in form, but in their political practice as well. Copyright 2007, Oxford University Press.