연방제도 정립과정 비교: 안정된 연방국가 7개국의 다층구조 거버넌스 구축을 중심으로

• Published in: 한국과 국제정치, 23(4) Vol. 23; no. 4; pp. 99 - 137
• Main Authors: 이옥연, Ok Yeon Yi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: Korean
• Published: 경남대학교 극동문제연구소 30.12.2007; 극동문제연구소
• Subjects: 7 Advanced Federal States; Federalism; Multi-Level Governance; Shared Federative Sovereignty; 정치외교학
• ISSN: 1225-3006; 2713-7570
• DOI: 10.17331/kwp.2007.23.4.004

As ideology to promote associations among interdependent groups, federalism explores to institutionalize shared rule and self-rule in balance. In principle, federal institutions are designed to provide constituents with routes to resolve conflict, protect minorities and their rights from encroachment, furnish a forum to represent regional or territorial interests, and/or offer opportunities to experiment policy innovation on a subnational level. Yet democratic governance is not exclusively limited to federative arrangements; other systems of governance may actually excel. Furthermore, the fundamental tension lies in a natural tendency of federalism either to get excessively centralized or too decentralized, thus contradicting ideals pursued in democracy. Why federalism is often preferred to other types of governance, then, is not because of its inherent superiority but because of its potentials to prevent or undo such dysfunctions through meticulously devised mechanisms. Needless to say, each country and regime with its own specific historical, institutional and circumstantial factors encounters its everchanging political, economic and social landscapes over time, which requires a specific adjustment in its fiscal management, institutional rearrangement and even constitutional revision. Federalism provides not only solutions to these specific problems but also perspectives to problems of governance. Consequently, discreet outcomes of federalism are readily available across different countries and times, and even among different administrations/cabinets in the same country. Despite such individual idiosyncrasy, federalism can be defined as “a covenant to carry out what was compromised for the sake of creating a new locus among political constituents.” Accordingly all federative arrangements are commonly in pursuit of multi-level governance in which interstate, intrastate, and inter-community relations are arguably coordinated in the most effective and democratic manner. In this paper, I explore how 7 advanced federal states—Austria, Australia, Canada, Germany, United States, Belgium, and Switzerland—institutionalize these various forms of federative arrangements and put them into practice by emphasizing several key factors. This paper is also an attempt to establish typology regarding federalism as multi-level governance, thus contributing to the study of comparative federalism. KCI Citation Count: 7