FEDERALISM AS A TOOL OF AUTOCRATIC CONSOLIDATION

Nicholas Aroney, Renato Costa, and Bruno Santos Cunha

Nicholas Aroney is Professor of Constitutional Law and Center Director of the Center for Public, International and Comparative Law, TC Beirne School of Law, University of Queensland
Renato Costa is Lecturer in Law and Director for Comparative Law at the Center for Public, International and Comparative Law, TC Beirne School of Law, University of Queensland
Bruno Santos Cunha is a State Attorney in Brazil and PhD in Constitutional Law.

The liberal constitutionalist case for federalism rests on a familiar promise: distribute power across territory, and the federal architecture will check the center, restrain the executive, and insulate constitutional democracy against majoritarian and authoritarian capture. The book Federalism in a Turbulent Era suggests that this promise rests on a precondition too rarely examined: federal systems deliver on it only when federal culture is also present. Where it is lacking, federal structures often fail to constrain – and may even assist – authoritarian and populist consolidation. Russia, Brazil and, more catastrophically, Ethiopia each illustrate the point in a different way.

This is one of the uncomfortable observations we draw from the volume’s nine country studies: the constitutional checks public lawyers associate with federalism are themselves contingent on cultural and social foundations that neither constitutional drafting nor judicial enforcement can reliably supply.

Russia: federal form as instrument of personalist rule

The 1993 Russian Constitution is genuinely federal on its face: a Federation Council representing the regions, a written allocation of powers, and fiscal decentralisation. However, Boris Yeltsin’s federalism failed for a familiar reason. Decentralisation in the absence of democratic culture produces what Grigorii Golosov has called “laboratories of authoritarianism” rather than “laboratories of democracy”. Rather than abolish the federal system, President Vladimir Putin used it to consolidate his power.

Irina Busygina and Mikhail Filippov describe how Putin’s federalism has, since 2000, converted regional executives into agents of the center while preserving the federal architecture as legitimating cover. Direct gubernatorial elections were abolished in 2004 and restored in 2012 only behind a “municipal filter”, screening candidates for loyalty. “Election performance” – delivering properly “ordered” turnout and vote shares – became the metric for evaluating governors. Kirill Kalinin has argued[CM1] [RC2]  that election fraud now functions as a loyalty signal rewarded with advancement.

The wartime configuration is most revealing. On 16 March 2022, shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, President Putin issued a decree[PP3] [RC4]  shifting responsibility for “socio-economic stability” to regional governors. This included retail prices, social services, infrastructure, mobilisation, and support for soldiers’ families. Alongside these developments, federal financial transfers were tightened, and “fake news” laws of March 2022 were enforced disproportionately in the provinces.

These developments produce what Busygina and Filippov (above) call “autocratic federalism” i.e. a centralisation of political power alongside calculated decentralisation of economic and social tasks. The regions absorb the unpopular burdens of the war while the center retains its monopoly over it, and federal institutions sustain regime resilience under sanctions and conscription pressure. Far from restraining the war, this distortion of federalism helps sustain it.

Brazil: populist capture from above and below

Brazil’s 1988 Constitution sought the opposite of Russia’s. Costa and Cunha argue in their chapter that it was drafted to dismantle a long tradition of executive centralism inherited from the “Estado Novo” and the military period – and that it has failed. The Brazilian states today function less as constituent polities than as administrative units of the center. Decision-making remains concentrated in the federal executive, supported by an accommodating Federal Supreme Court (usually called by the Portuguese acronym, “STF”) that has shown limited appetite for resisting centralising emergency measures.

The pattern is bipartisan in its dysfunction. The constitutional emergency apparatus has been invoked by leaders of both the left (Lula) and the right (Bolsonaro) to advance personalist agendas, with institutional resistance only intermittent. The municipalisation that the 1988 Constitution was supposed to deliver has produced 5,500 fiscally dependent municipalities rather than a robust intergovernmental balance.

The Brazilian case also reveals the relationship between emergency powers and populist exploitation. The 1988 Constitution vests the federal executive with sweeping emergency authority alongside a virtually unconstrained power to intervene in the states. In the hands of populist leaders, these tools become instruments not of constitutional preservation but of political consolidation – as both Bolsonaro’s manipulation of emergency decrees during the pandemic and Lula’s response to the January 8 riots illustrate[PP5] [RC6] . There are, however, glimmers of a different path. In a series of pandemic-era decisions, the STF affirmed the autonomy of state governors [CM7] [PP8] [RC9] to impose health restrictions against federal opposition, invoking Justice Brandeis’s “laboratories of democracy” doctrine from New State Ice Co. v. Liebmann (1932). Whether this reflects genuine reorientation or opportunistic resistance to one president remains unclear.

The constitutional lesson is uncomfortable. In Brazil, the federal architecture exists, the Supreme Court is functioning, judicial review operates, and yet the underlying disposition to think federally, the cultural commitment to seeing power as legitimately distributed rather than concentrated, has never consolidated. The result is a constitutional system in which federal form is emptied by executive substance.

Ethiopia: when ethnic federalism meets institutional failure

Ethiopia is the most tragic of the three cases. Here, autocratic capture tips into catastrophe. Yonatan Fessha and Terefe Gebreyesus, writing in our volume[CM10] [RC11] , describe a 1995 Constitution that took the integrative theory of federalism to its logical limit. This included: subnational units defined by ethnicity, an unrestricted right to self-determination including secession, and a House of Federation composed of ethnic representatives serving as the sole interpreter of the Constitution.

For nearly three decades the system held together because the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF)-led Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF[PP12] [RC13] ) coalition resolved disputes internally, through an ultimately centralist pathway. Federal decentralisation was never the operative mechanism; the tightly controlled coalition was. Thus, when the EPRDF coalition fractured under Abiy Ahmed’s assumption of the premiership in 2018, the federation was left without an effective umpire. The House of Federation could not function as an impartial interpreter of the Constitution because no party to any dispute could accept that the House was truly impartial and not inclined to favour one or another ethnic group. Fessha warned in 2020 that the federation was already in serious trouble.

The Tigray war of 2020 to 2022 cost roughly one million lives, with significant human rights violations on multiple sides of the conflict. The war has since spread to the state of Amhara. In Fessha and Gebreyesus’s analysis, this was not simply a political failure. It was a failure of federalism. Where ethnic cleavages are constitutionalised, where the umpire is itself politically compromised, and where no functioning intergovernmental architecture exists to channel disputes, conflicts about constitutional interpretation and the distribution of political power can have nowhere to go but to the battlefield.

The constitutional design implications

These three cases sit on a spectrum: deliberate weaponisation of the federal form (Russia); chronic failure to displace a culture of executive concentration (Brazil); and catastrophic collapse where ethnic cleavages are constitutionalised without functioning intergovernmental machinery or an accepted umpire (Ethiopia).

What the cases share is the absence of what Daniel Elazar called a federal disposition or spirit:[CM14] [RC15]  a cultural commitment to thinking of public power as legitimately distributed across multiple spheres. Aroney and Costa argue in the volume’s introduction that the effectiveness of federalism in moderating crises depends on the conjunction of three conditions: substantial self-rule, substantial coordinative capacity, and an underlying federal society and federal culture. These cases show what happens when the second and third conditions are missing or undermined.

First, constitutional drafting cannot, on its own, do the work its framers often hope it will. The cultural and sociological preconditions of functioning federalism must be built and sustained over time, through civic, political, judicial and intergovernmental practices. Designers can construct structures that support this underlying reality, but they cannot substitute for it.

Second, treating federalism, decentralisation and devolution as inherently rights-protective needs reconsideration. Federal structures offer tools of governance as much as constraints on government; in the hands of populists and autocrats they can serve centralising ends. The question is not whether a system has federal or decentralised form, but whether it has the culture that gives that form practical content. This is usually the most decisive variable, but the hardest to engineer.

This is how we have come to understand the title of our book. The turbulence concerns not only the discrete crises each case study examines, but the phenomenon of federal architectures being subjected to stresses they were not built to withstand — by populist and authoritarian forces that have learned to operate within and through them, rather than against them.

Nicholas Aroney is Professor of Constitutional Law and Center Director of the Center for Public, International and Comparative Law, TC Beirne School of Law, University of Queensland

Renato Costa is Lecturer in Law and Director for Comparative Law at the Center for Public, International and Comparative Law, TC Beirne School of Law, University of Queensland

Bruno Santos Cunha is a State Attorney in Brazil and PhD in Constitutional Law.

The authors are respectively editors and chapter authors of Federalism in a Turbulent Era (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2026).

Suggested Citation: Nicholas Aroney, Renato Costa and Bruno Santos Cunha, ‘Federalism as a Tool of Autocratic Contestation’ IACL-AIDC Blog (23 June 2026) FEDERALISM AS A TOOL OF AUTOCRATIC CONSOLIDATION — IACL-IADC Blog