 Regarding distributive justice, federal political orders must manage tensions between ensuring member unit autonomy and securing the requisite redistribution within and among the member units. Indeed, the Federalists regarded federal arrangements as an important safeguard against “the equal division of property” (Federalist 10). The political scientists Linz and Stepan may be seen as finding support for the Federalists’ hypothesis: Compared to unitary states in the OECD, the ‘coming together’ federations tend to have higher child poverty rate in solo mother households and a higher percentage of population over-sixty living in poverty. Linz and Stepan explain this inequality as stemming from the ‘demos constraining’ arrangements of these federations, seeking to protect individuals and member units from central authorities, combined with a weak party system. By comparison, the Constitution of Germany (not a ‘coming together’ federation) explicitly requires equalization of living conditions among the member units (Art. 72.2). Presbey argues that ethnic federalism further exacerbates unfair distribution of resources among individuals of different ethnic groups in Africa (Presbey 2003). Normative arguments may also support some distributive significance of federal arrangements, for instance owing to trade-offs between member unit autonomy and redistributive claims among member units (Føllesdal 2001), or the relevance of a shared ‘identity‘ (Grégoire and Jewkes 2015, de Schutter 2011). A central normative issue is to what extent a shared culture and bonds among citizens within a historically sovereign state reduce the claims on redistribution among the member units.