Through case studies of India and Nigeria, the dissertation examines the capacity of federal governance to promote national unity in heavily divided societies of the Third World. It revisits the familiar hypothesis that federalism, by means of power sharing, consensus building, and other "unity-in-diversity" measures, offers an effective solution to the problems of division and conflict so commonly afflicting multi-ethnic post-colonial states.
The dissertation argues that existing studies of the above relationship are hampered by their assumption that federalism operates according to a fixed set of criteria, a "modular" perspective that overlooks finer details of causality. A decision making approach more commonly seen in policy studies of Western industrialized countries is employed here as a methodological alternative to the whole-country orientations of existing studies. This reductionism in the current approach permits increased accuracy in the examination of causal relationships, exposing flaws and weaknesses in the application of a comprehensive theoretical model, thereby helping to explain inconsistent outcomes.
On a third level of analysis, the dissertation explores the preferential policy type, as represented by "affirmative action" in the distribution of universities and the admission of new students to those universities. It is argued that preferential policies provide third world federalism with a "refinement" that may be essential to successful outcomes in conditions of extreme diversity. Decision making factors play a crucial role in determining the successful application of educational preferences (treated here as a federal subset, or process), factors whose influence is greatly magnified by the inherently controversial nature of the topic.
The findings of the study are mostly qualitative confirmations, of the above relationships. Attempts to insert analytical rigor through quantitative analysis (as has been done in Western European and American studies) were frustrated by the scarcity of decision making data. In assessing the utility of the decision making model, the study establishes the relative importance of contextual factors and other decision making "Pre-conditions," suggesting that studies in the "public policy" tradition not ignore wider perspectives such as political culture.
