Constitutional Structures and Politics in Multinational Democracies: Structuring Political Orientations (Federalism and Internal Conflicts) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 303199504X ISBN 13: 9783031995040

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan, 2026

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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).

From the Back Cover

This book elegantly integrates multiple strands of the multinational democracy paradigm, drawing from normative political theory, comparative politics, and constitutional law.

Francesco Palermo, Professor of Law, University of Verona and Institute for Comparative Federalism, Eurac Research, Bolzano/Bozen, Italy.

This important book identifies a key challenge to western democracies: minority nationalist movements who share the same liberal democratic credentials as the states themselves. The authors trace the rise and decline of secessionist movements and constitutional strategies to manage them, framed by an excellent, state of the art Introduction.

Michael Keating, Professor of Politics (Emeritus), European University Institute, Florence, Italy, and University of Aberdeen, UK.

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).

Edition details

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 303199504X
• ISBN 13: 9783031995040
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 443
• Editor: Lluch Jaime