Representative Democracy as a Necessary Condition for the Survival of a Federal Constitution

It does not follow from the supposition that the union is beneficialthat its terms would go unchallenged by its members. The argumentin this article suggests that federal stability (robustness)requires for itself a well-functioning democratic process, whichsatisfies a fairly restrictive condition. A necessary conditionfor the resiliency of the federal regime is a representativedemocracy; furthermore, it is the representative democracy inwhich rewards to the representatives are only in part vestedin their parochial constituencies, while in the other part comeform other sources, e.g., from an oversized at-large coalition.The requirement to the democratic process is, of course, onlya necessary, not a sufficient condition for the federal success.Yet, we argue in this essay that only the states with well-developed(properly institutionalized) democratic electoral competitionhave a chance to form a resilient federal union and sustaintheir federal constitutional arrangements not just in form,but in their political practice as well.