Democracy in Canada: the disintegration of our institutions

cation of taxing and spending powers and the structure of intergovernmental transfers’ (p. 171). This overall measurement is much more refined than for instance that of the Regional Authority Index, which also makes its application somewhat harder and time-consuming, however. Part III, finally, delineates sources, catalysts, strategies, and actors of institutional change (chapter 7), on the one hand, and discusses five specific ‘hubs of change’ (chapter 8): constitutional amendments, de-constitutionalisation, allocation techniques, adjudication, and global governance. Particularly that last factor opens exciting avenues of supraand sub-regional alliances in the eternal quest for the satisfaction of both regional diversity and policy effectiveness. But while it is in this third part that the new dynamic theory of federalism spreads its wings the widest, the author remains commendably frank in calling for more work to be done in the different disciplines to really get to the bottom of how and why institutional change occurs – or why not, or why only too little, too late. The novelty of Popelier’s approach, then, lies not so much in the development of dozens of sometimes very detailed and sophisticated indicators of status, power, and fiscal resources and their national and regional measurement in the case of Belgium; nor in the breadth of examples adduced from across the federal universe. Instead, it is the very ‘balance’ she postulates as constituting the essence of federalism that should be further built upon: a balance not merely between centralization and regional authority, but one between regional diversity and overall cohesion. While it is certainly debatable what exactly constitutes the ‘right’ degree of diversity in the sense of regional autonomy, asymmetry and co-decision rights (shared rule), and although ‘cohesion’ is equally likely to trigger many different associations and value judgements, federal research only advances if its own diversity of approaches is properly bundled into a cohesive whole. If that makes Dynamic Federalism appear as but the first episode, nothing stands in the way of collectively producing the rest of the series.