Differences and Commonalities Between Authoritarian and Liberal Federations

The correlation between political regimes and federalism is still a controversial question in political science. Most classic works say that federalism can exist only in democracies, but recent works try to present an opposite opinion. This research is dedicated to the qualitative comparative analysis of differences and commonalities between authoritarian and liberal federations. 24 cases of modern federal states were overviewed and studied with the fuzzy-set QCA strategy. In the course of the work, we found out that authoritarian and liberal federal states are mostly similar in the main federal structural elements such as the administrative autonomy, geopolitical division, direct governance, availability of the federal contract and established bicameral system. At the same time, authoritarian and liberal federations are different in the way how the federal system works within these structural elements, even in the case of federations within groups of federal states divided according to the established political regime.