Constitutional Structures and Politics in Multinational Democracies: Structuring Political Orientations

Constitutional structures are an important mechanism for structuring the politics of multinational democracies, especially the political jousting between sub-state demoi and the state demos in plurinational polities. This book analyzes the interaction, which can be bi-directional, between constitutional structures and the trends and evolution of the heterogenous political orientations in substate national societies and majority nations in liberal democracies.

“Constitutional structures” refers to a wide variety of institutions and processes, and they create territorial regimes, which constitute distinctive models of state: unitarism, federalism, autonomism, regionalism, consociationalism, or even colonialism. Multinational democracies differ in the constitutional limitations and/or opportunities for accommodation of diversity offered by constitutional structures.

The authors in this collection utilize diverse methods and address these issues from different disciplinary perspectives.  The book contains analyses of Québec-Canada, Catalonia-Spain, Puerto Rico-USA, Italy and its special regions, Scotland-United Kingdom, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Corsica-France, the Åland Islands-Finland, Mauritius, Fiji, and other cases.

Jaime Lluch is Professor of Political Science at the University of Puerto Rico. He has been awarded a National Science Foundation Fellowship, a Ford Foundation Fellowship, and has held visiting fellowships at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy, the Collegio Carlo Alberto in Turin, Italy, the European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, UK, and the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Visions of Sovereignty: Nationalism and Accommodation in Multinational Democracies (2014).