Moving Beyond the ‘National-Local’ DivideThe Notion of Interoolitical Relations and Its Potentials for Comparative Analysis

Abstract

While most of the nations in today's world are divided into multiple territorial units each governed by a non-central government, attempts to investigate the mechanisms of political complexity brought about by such spatial and governmental segmentation have been rare, if not totally absent. This essay seeks to overcome this situation by proposing a new analytical approach.
Conventional understanding of the structure of domestic politics, represented by the ‘center-local relations’ model of intergovernmental relations, seems to have a couple of serious limits. First, it tries to interpret domestic politics unidimensionally according to the levels of government, making light of another dimension, that of space. Second, it focuses its attention to the interactions between governments of different levels, leaving out other political actors, such as political parties and interest groups.
In its place, I will introduce a two-dimensional interpretation of domestic politics and an analytical approach based on it I call ‘interpolitical relations.’ This approach brings in a set of multi-level political process that involves all political actors for each of the two political dimensions. As to the spatial dimension, domestic politics will be classified according to the size of the territorial unit (polity) that has its own political process. In regard to the governmental dimension, the classification would be made according to the level of government. The resulting structure of the whole domestic politics, which I here call ‘interpolitical relations,’ will be determined by the combination of the state of relationships between different political levels in each dimension.
As a measurement necessary to distinguish a set of interpolitical relations from another, I will introduce the degree of autonomy of a lower-level political process to its higher-level counterpart in each political dimension. This measurement pays attention to how much a lower-level politics in each dimension is organized without being influenced or dominated by its higher-level counterpart. In order to find out what type of interpolitical relations a nation's politics belongs to, I propose to examine the workings of constitutional system and party system of a nation, for these two systems play constitutional or constituent function in most, if not all, of modem constitutional democracies. How these systems divide or connect different levels of political process in two dimensions will be the subject of inquiry in determining the type of interpolitical relations.
Having clarified the analytical framework and the research strategy of this approach, I apply it to post-Soviet Russian politics. In response to Peter Ordeshook who criticizes the current Russian constitutional structure for its inability to encourage the development of a nationwide party system that may politically ‘integrate’ the federation, I point out that while his analysis has the strength of paying attention to the interactions between different levels of political process in the governmental dimension, his unidimensional political image prevents him from acknowledging the diverse ways of organizing a stable federal system.