Conceptualising and Mapping State Structures in Western Europe

The proposed paper would contribute to the objectives of panel 2 New Methodologies in the Study of Territorial Politics by offering a novel conceptualisation of state structures and a methodology for measuring and mapping them, with an application to the states of Western Europe. In particular, the paper addresses in a new way the old question of the distinction between unitary and federal states and of how this distinction relates to the notion of de/centralisation. As conceptualising and classifying are crucial steps in most research designs in comparative politics, by so doing the paper would contribute to methodological advances in this field. The first section of the paper briefly reviews the literature and discusses the strengths and limitations of the qualitative typologies and quantitative indices currently available. The following section develops a new conceptualisation of state structures, which combines the unitary/federal distinction and de/centralisation, and integrates the extent of a/symmetry. From such conceptualisation, the paper derives a ‘static’ typology of state structures at any given point in time and a ‘dynamic’ typology of change over time. These typologies are then operationalised through a coding scheme to map state structures in Western Europe over the 1950-2015 period. The mapping exercise yields a typology of state restructuring in Western Europe consisting of four clusters of cases. The concluding section summarises the contributions the paper seeks to make and discusses their significance for the methodology of territorial politics in contemporary Europe.