Designing Federalism: A Theory of Self-Sustainable Federal Institutions. By Mikhail Filippov, Peter C. Ordeshook, and Olga Shvetsova. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 392p. $75.00 cloth, $28.00 paper.

This book is a highly ambitious attempt to provide a general theory on the self-sustainability of democratic federal systems of government. The authors' central hypothesis is that federal states can reach an equilibrium when both state- and federal-level political actors have an incentive to make electoral and other concessions in order to maintain the federal order. In contrast to unitary states, however, the central design feature of federations is not how best to create institutions that ensure that elected politicians faithfully serve constituent interests, but rather the opposite: How can institutions be designed in such a way that the politicians can become imperfect agents of the voters? For if the federation is to evolve into a stable polity, state-level elected representatives must persuade their voters that their interests must be put to one side, at least in the shorter term, because of the sacrifices involved in ceding power to the federal government. Similarly, federal-level politicians have to persuade their constituents to grant policy and other concessions to state governments.