Dr Lingkai Kong is a visiting researcher at the Institute for one month. Below, he describes the research he will be conducting in Switzerland, which focuses on municipal autonomy in Portugal.

What specific challenge does your research address?

Most comparative research still sorts polities into federal or unitary based on constitutional text. In Portugal, federal-type governance has accumulated for decades through ordinary legislation. Intermunicipal Communities act as quasi-federal tiers, fiscal transfers are negotiated rather than constitutionalized, and subsidiarity is invoked to justify transfers but never to restrain central supervision. The challenge is to explain how a state can grow increasingly federal in practice while its constitutional core remains untouched.

How does your background shape your research?

I earned my master's degree in Switzerland and my doctorate in Turkey, and I am currently doing postdoctoral research in Portugal. My PhD work taught me to treat decentralization as a normative problem about legitimacy, not just efficiency. In Portugal, the functions of federalism are mimicked while its democratic legitimacy requirements are evaded. Training in economics at Zurich also pushes me to look at fiscal dependency, where the unitary logic is hardest to disguise.

Personal website of Lingkai Kong