The canonical structure of higher dimensional pure Chern-Simons theories is
analysed. It is shown that these theories have generically a non-vanishing
number of local degrees of freedom, even though they are obtained by means of a
topological construction. This number of local degrees of freedom is computed
as a function of the spacetime dimension and the dimension of the gauge group.Comment: 9 pages, RevTeX3.0 (LaTeX2.09), no figure
