Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
political conflict. This condition determined the extent to which cases provided
leverage for causal identification.
Yet, the fact that a particular arrangement is given at the time of a shock
does not necessarily shelter it from eventually becoming the object of political
contention or, more importantly, for having been in the past. This topic has
shown how conflicts over fiscal structures and conflicts over political repre-
sentation of territorial interests condition one another in a dynamic, bidirec-
tional way, often fostering institutional stability in political unions. This line
of reasoning brings out one final corollary: the need to better understand the
relationship between the distributive tensions emerging from the geography
of inequality and labor market risks, and the original constitutional bargains
in federations. Constitutions freeze the organization of political representation
for long historical periods, thus shaping the dynamics of what Ackerman called
“ordinary politics” (Ackerman
1998
). Therefore, a full account of the origins
of different systems of representation of territorial interests demands a bet-
ter understanding of the role of distributive conflicts in shaping the original
contract of political unions. While some scholarly effort has been devoted to
this problem (McGuire
2003
; Wibbels
2005a
), there is much room to cover,
both theoretically and empirically, to fully explain why some federal constitu-
tions are more centrifugal than others and what makes them evolve. Analyzing
the representation of territorial interests across constitutional agreements as a
function of economic geography is a natural path to follow in our continuing
efforts to decipher politics in complex unions around the world.