What is the generally accepted definition of federalism in which all 28 federal governments in the world agree?
Anderson: It is really quite minimal. Basically you have two orders of government, at least a central government and regional governments, each of which is directly elected by the population of its territory, and they are constitutionally established with some constitutions independent from one another. What variations of federalism are there? There are all kinds of variations. We have very centralised federations, like Venezuela, which is almost like a unitary country. And we have very decentralised federations like Switzerland and Canada. You have federations where the provinces or the states administer federal law. They are called integrated federations. You have federations where each level of government administers its own laws. You have quite different allocations of powers between federations. You have presidential federations versus parliamentary federations. You have federations with very few member states three or four or even two. At the other end you have Russia where there
