Introduction
No level of government is equipped to confront the security challenges of the 21st century alone. As with other public matters, federations go about security differently from unitary systems.
The latter merely have to contend with collective action problems created by the horizontal division of security and intelligence services. Federal states, by contrast, further have to contend with a vertical separation of security powers and forces across constituent units. On the one hand, federalism has an advantage over unitary security systems: the constitutional division of powers by levels of government checks the potential risks that security and intelligence powers pose for individual and collective freedoms through the structural and functional distribution of responsibilities (Burgess 2006). On the other hand, federalism poses a security risk precisely because it is thought to impede efficient decision making in matters of public security. When terrorist attacks occur in federal or decentralized countries, they usually precipitate calls for more coordinated and centralized action at the central and/or European level of government (Riedl 2018).Processes of shifting competences and governance practices which emanate from different and changing configurations of distribution of powers in federal, federalizing and decentralizing polities have been studied extensively across other policy fields (Watts 2007). The provision of security, however, has long been ignored in comparative federalism (Collins 2016). To identify more (and less) optimal approaches to exploit synergies between federalism and public security, we recently concluded a comprehensive comparison of the constitutions, institutions and legislation that inform security in different federations and the consequences for institutional design, public administration and public order (Leuprecht, Kolling and Hataley 2019). Research questions that drove the study included: does federal institutional design affect the exercise and provision of public security? How do public security systems actually work in practice? Is public security provided differently in homogenous (for example, Germany) or heterogeneous (for example, Canada) federations? How did the system change over time? What explains change and inertia? How are intergovernmental cooperation mechanisms implemented?
In selecting Brazil, Canada, Germany, India, Mexico, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland and the USA as country case-studies, we eliminated federations that are relatively small, have a dubious or no record of democratic governance, or are relatively new.
One country in this remit, Spain, in effect is decentralized so as to function like a federation. Comparison is complicated because the constituent units across these federal systems are structured differently, with different types of status, power and jurisdiction. In each country, federalism and security have undergone quite particular and historically contingent developments. Furthermore, the impact of the institutional design on the efficient production and equitable allocation of security is difficult to isolate. Endogenous effects complicate efforts to disentangle the performance of a federal system. That makes it difficult to control systematically for vertical and horizontal effects, such as decentralization and asymmetry, on security outcomes.2
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