Paper title: Success and failure of territorial reforms: a theoretical analysis

Most federal and quasi-federal systems have at some point been faced with the questioning of the defining features of their constituent units or demands to change the distribution and exercise of powers and responsibilities among the central and regional levels of government. However, whether and the extent to which territorial reform proposals get approved and implemented varies largely over time and across different multilevel systems. Whereas many studies in federalism have focused and tried to explain individual cases of reforms, efforts to comparatively account for processes of territorial reform in multilevel systems are still scarce. To contribute to filling this gap in the literature, the proposed paper aims at building a theoretical proposal on the conditions of feasibility of institutional or constitutional policies across countries; and the theoretical arguments will be mostly illustrated with examples from the reform process of the statutes of autonomy of Spanish autonomous communities According to our explanatory model, some of the main features likely to influence the success or failure of territorial reform proposals are: the contents of the reform and its technical and political viability, the timing and sequence of the reform process, and political competition, including political leadership, as well as country-specific factors such as possible pathologies of constitutional and administrative design. Given its focus and perspective, this proposal seems to fit especially -and thus the authors would be interested- in panel 7 "State Restructuring: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives".