Mikhail Filippov

This is not a bad book on federalism, but I think the argumentation could have been a lot more clear and concise. The first 100 pages or so provide an introduction to the theoretical problems that federal political institutions pose in political theory. After that the book seems to branch this way and that without sustaining a clear purpose. Maybe it's because it was written as a collaboration between three authors. Although I appreciate the authors' attempt to illustrate their theoretical show more analyses with examples from federal systems across the world, I found most of the discussion uninformative. In my opinion they should have thought more carefully about what exactly they wanted to argue. They also should have constructed their analysis around better theoretical concepts than the minimalistic "levels 1, 2 and 3 of federal design" they now discuss. They also could have pruned away a lot of inessential material to make the book more readable. Although there are some interesting pieces of insight here and there in this book, they're too few and dispersed too far apart. show less