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Drawing on the game-theoretical dominant player concept and power indices, this paper introduces a re-conceptualization of single-party dominance that we consider to be more intuitive and less dependent on ad hoc criteria than standard operationalizations of the phenomenon. This operational definition is then used in the presentation of a few descriptive inferences on the incidence and nature of single-party dominance in the subnational jurisdictions of four federally organized parliamentary democracies, namely, Canada, Australia, Germany and Austria. The paper also reviews extant hypotheses on the rise and fall of dominant party regimes and discusses their plausability against the backdrop of our cases. We conclude that there are few, if any, individually necessary or sufficient causes of single-party dominance. Instead, nationally and perhaps even regionally specific configurations of factors seem to account for the rise and fall of dominant party regimes - a finding that underlines the necessity of further multi-method research on the topic. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deciding how to finance multiple levels of government is a challenging task for all political systems. Federal states, in addition, have a constitutional contract to divide financial accountability across national and subnational governments. In comparison with unitary states, federal states are arguably more committed to fiscal decentralization precisely because of this constitutional contract. Nevertheless, a wide variation in the extent of fiscal centralization is observed even among developed federal states. This paper explores the political economy of fiscal centralization in six developed federal states, Australia, Canada, Austria, Germany, the United States, and Belgium, from 1961 through 1995. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the unintended but inevitable consequences of federal constitutions is the creation of transboundary waters, river basins that are shared among multiple states/provinces, and, in some cases, other countries, as well. The existence of transboundary waters creates difficulties for the riparian governments sharing them because they are locked in a common pool situation in which each government faces simultaneous and contradictory incentives: in their own interests, they are motivated to secure access to resource flows, but, in the collective interest, they must also conserve the resource stock. Managing such a situation requires collective action, and much has been written about the factors that are important in facilitating such collective action, such as the importance of shared interests, mutual trust, and the enforceability of intergovernmental commitments. However, in many basins there is a long history of intergovernmental cooperation in water management, and this history, in itself, has become an important factor shaping more recent water management efforts. Early efforts at transboundary water management focused mostly on either water apportionment or dispute resolution, and these early water management regimes have proven strongly path dependent, shaping more recent management efforts that have focused on water conservation. In other words, early institutional choices in transboundary water management, when water conservation was not a priority, have shaped transboundary conservation regimes now that water conservation is a priority, pointing to the importance of institutional path dependency as a factor in shaping intergovernmental cooperation. This argument is explored through a comparison of four distinct transboundary river basins in Australia, the United States and Canada. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]