Constitutional Negotiations in Federal Reforms: Interests, Interaction Orientation and the Prospect of Agreement

Abstract

Constitutional amendments in federal political systems have to be negotiated between national and subnational actors. While theories of negotiation usually explain the outcome by looking at these actors, their preferences and bargaining powers, the theoretical model developed in this article also includes their interaction orientation. The article determines a typical sequence of bargaining and arguing and identifies favourable conditions for co-operation based on different interaction orientations. The article states that actors can reconcile the conflicting logics of intergovernmental or party competition and joint decision making in constitutional politics through a sequence of bargaining and arguing. However, constitutional amendments negotiated in this way run the risk of undermining the legitimacy and functionality of constitutions.

Keywords:

• Constitutional negotiations
• federalism
• interaction orientation
• political reforms

Acknowledgements

I thank the German Research Council for funding my research project ‘Constitutional amendments in established democracies’, which allowed me to come to the conclusions reported in this article. I also thank the German Association for Political Science (DVPW) for awarding the monograph on the research findings the prize for the best post-doc work in 2009.