Neither unitary nor federal: Did Bolivians invent something new?

The unitary–federal dichotomy is used as a standard means for taxonomizing state forms. However, its classificatory power has been increasingly stretched by heterodox cases such as Spain, Italy, South Africa and, most recently, Bolivia. This article contends that Bolivia’s constitutional changes have definitively challenged the long-standing assumption that the unitary–federal divide best serves the goal of an accurate taxonomization in the field of comparative federalism. Despite the noise Bolivia’s latest constitutional reform has caused in the otherwise settled framework of comparative federalism’s most basic concepts, scholarship is opting for the most comfortable choice by squeezing Bolivia into the unitary compartment. Subsequent to the screening of different types of taxonomic approaches, a new classificatory framework for state forms, based on a dichotomy that combines legal theory and the methodological tools of political science, is proposed and tested on the Bolivian case.