Explaining Sub-national Constitutional Space
By G. Alan Tarr.
Every federal system is structured by a federal constitution that divides power, establishes central institutions, prescribes the rules for resolving disputes, safeguards rights, and provides a procedure for its own alteration. In some federal systems, the federal constitution prescribes the political institutions and processes for the country’s constituent units as well, thus furnishing the constitutional architecture for the entire federal system. This is the case in Belgium and Canada, for example. But in most federal systems, the federal constitution is an “incomplete” framework document in that it does not prescribe all constitutional processes and arrangements. Rather, it leaves “space” in the federal system’s constitutional architecture to be filled by the constitutions of its sub-national units, even while it sets parameters within which those units are permitted to act. However, those federal systems that recognize a place for sub-national constitutions differ markedly in the extent to which the federal constitution is incomplete, that is, in the amount of space that they allocate to constituent units to define their own goals and establish their own governmental institutions and processes. In previous research, I have focused on the range of discretion (“constitutional space”) available to constituent units in designing their constitutional arrangements and on how the boundaries of that space are policed. In this article, I extend the inquiry into sub-national constitutional space to consider what factors influence the scope of sub-national constitutional space in various federal systems, why sub-national units have occupied or failed to occupy the constitutional space available to them, and what consequences sub-national constitutionalism has had on horizontal and vertical relations within federal systems.