Intergovernmental Integration in Canada, Switzerland, and the United States
This chapter demonstrates that power-concentration in the Canadian provinces leads to weak integration, while voluntary power-sharing in the Swiss cantons favours strong links between intergovernmental arrangements. In the United States compulsory power-sharing between state executives and state legislatures and within state executives undermines integration. None of the highly institutionalized arrangements represent the ‘states’ as coherent units. They compete for influence on federal policy, thus, integration is weak. Regarding the overall patters of territorial representation, in U.S. federalism relations between national and regional intergovernmental arrangements (as federal-state relations more generally) work top down. In Canada dynamics work bottom-up with only few issues finding broad enough support to travel from regional into national intergovernmental arrangements. Switzerland comes closest to a national-regional balance with arrangements on either level having a say about which institution should handle a particular issue.
Keywords: intergovernmental integration, territorial interest representation, compulsory power-sharing, voluntary power-sharing
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