Benchmarking Asymmetries? Federalist and Unitarist Nations in Comparison

The question whether the state’s system has an impact on the state’s performance remains unsolved. Albeit several works theorized and examined consequences of federalism and unitarism for a country’s capability the matter is unsettled and still in academic debate. The research project aims to address this research issue and analyses federal and unitarist countries along both, the social-political and an economic dimension. The paper applies a combined approach drawing on quantitative as well as qualitative methods. While the former methodology will be used to benchmark states’ performances and asymmetries, the latter is in use in order to identify the underlying causality of the quantitative results. Thus, the paper seeks to give an empirical insight on the relationship between federalist respectively unitarist systems and asymmetric states’ capacities.