Spatial econometrics methods have been extensively applied to the analysis of decentralized fiscal policy-making in the past two decades, with most research focussing on the investigation of spatial patterns arising from various forms of competition among local authorities. This chapter first reviews the several contributions in the spatial analysis of local government data that have appeared since the publication of the first edition of the Handbook of Fiscal Federalism (2006) - over seventy fresh empirical works - with the aim of evaluating the advancements that have been made since then in the knowledge and understanding of interjurisdictional competition phenomena. The second part of the chapter discusses the impact on the empirical analysis of intergovernmental fiscal interaction of a number of recent econometric developments concerning the specification, estimation and interpretation of spatial models, and concludes with some remarks on the foreseeable developments in geografiscal federalism research.
This Essay addresses a gap in the federalism literature. Scholars have offered two distinct visions of federal-state relations. The first depicts states as rivals and challengers to the federal government, roles they play by virtue of being autonomous policymakers outside the federal system. A second vision is offered by scholars of cooperative federalism, who argue that in most areas states serve not as autonomous outsiders, but supportive insiders – servants and allies carrying out federal policy. Legal scholarship has not connected these competing visions to consider how the state's status as servant, insider, and ally might enable it to be a sometime dissenter, rival, and challenger. The literature has not developed a vocabulary for describing how states use regulatory power conferred by the government to resist federal policy, let alone a full account of the implications of this practice. It has thus neglected the possibilities associated with what we call "uncooperative federalism." In this Essay, we provide an initial descriptive and normative account of this undertheorized aspect of our federalism. We also explore what a strong commitment to uncooperative federalism would mean for the doctrines on commandeering and preemption, offering some counterintuitive conclusions about the ways in which weakening the protections for state autonomy might push states to engage in stronger forms of dissent.
It's necessary to begin with considering the sort of judicially enforced federalism rejected in Garcia and to consider why the Court rejected it. According to this view of federalism, the Constitution leaves certain substantive affairs exclusively to the states, and what matters is making sure that states can regulate these without federal interference. So long as this domain is protected, the political significance of states is assured and federalism is secure. The federal government can, if it chooses, take charge of all those matters as to which state and federal authority is concurrent-though Congress will find this harder to accomplish when faced with the states' enhanced ability to muster political support. In any event, the key to a viable federalism is said to be the guarantee of judicially-enforced substantive limits on national authority. We begin with this approach to federalism because, while courts may not resolve every conflict between state and national authorities, they can simplify such problems by delimiting the sphere in which power is allocated through politics. And, indeed, many commentators believe the Supreme Court was wrong to abandon the task of defining a protected sphere of exclusive state jurisdiction.16 After the surrender of 1937 and after Garcia, they say, federalism is "dead," Congress is free to run berserk, and it's only a matter of time until the states lose what little political clout they have left and are rendered superfluities by a relentless federal juggernaut. We can say one thing for sure: The problem with judicially enforced federalism is not, as Justice Blackmun suggests in Garcia, that the Framers didn't want courts enforcing limits on national authority. Making statements about the Framers' intent is, of course, always hazardous. Because the relevant decision makers were the people who ratified the Constitution,17 deciding what the Constitution was intended to mean is as quixotic as interpreting election returns-- too many people chose among too few options for too ...
Many political issues like abortion, gay marriage or assisted suicide are strongly contested because individuals have preferences not only over their own choice but also about other individuals? actions. How should society decide these issues? This paper compares three regimes (centralization, decentralization and federalism) in an economy where individuals choose their residence and vote over a single-dimensional regulatory policy at the regional and national level. The main results are: (i) A move from decentralization to federalism, called moral federalism, is welfare improving behind the veil of ignorance if and only if centralization dominates decentralization, and (ii) for the group that favors a restrictive policy moral federalism is the more attractive the smaller its group size (subject to being the majority group), the larger the suffering from a given policy, and the smaller the regions? weight in determining the federal policy limit. The results are consistent with the Bush administration's attempt to restrict liberal policy choices at the state level after its narrow election victory in 2000.
Bridging the fields of federalism and negotiation theory, Negotiating Federalism analyzes how public actors navigate difficult federalism terrain by negotiating directly with counterparts across state-federal lines. In contrast to the stylized, zero-sum model of federalism that pervades political discourse and judicial doctrine, the Article demonstrates that the boundary between state and federal power is negotiated on scales large and small, and on an ongoing basis. It is also the first to recognize the procedural tools that bilateral federalism bargaining offers to supplement unilateral federalism interpretation in contexts of jurisdictional overlap. The Article begins by situating its inquiry within the age-old federalism discourse about which branch can best safeguard the values that give federalism meaning: Congress, through political safeguards; the Supreme Court, by judicially enforceable constraints; or the Executive, through administrative process. Yet each school of thought considers only how the branches operate unilaterally—on one side of the state-federal line or the other—missing the important ways that each one also works bilaterally across that line to protect federalism values through various forms of negotiated governance. Because unilateral interpretive methods fail to establish clear boundaries at the margins of state and federal authority, regulators increasingly turn to bilateral intergovernmental bargaining to allocate contested authority and facilitate collaboration in uncertain fed-eralism territory. Procedural constraints available within these negotia-tions can help bridge the interpretive gaps unresolved by more conven-tionally understood forms of interpretation. Creating the first theoretical framework for organizing federalism bar-gaining, the Article provides a taxonomy of the different opportunities for state-federal bargaining available within various constitutional and statutory frameworks. Highlighting forms of conventional bargaining, negotiations to reallocate authority, and joint policymaking bargaining, the Article maps this vast, uncharted landscape with illustrations ranging from the 2009 Stimulus Bill to Medicaid to climate policy. The taxonomy demonstrates how widely federalism bargaining permeates American governance, including not only the familiar example of spending power deals, but also subtler forms that have escaped previous scholarly notice as forms of negotiation at all. The Article then reviews the different media of exchange within feder-alism bargaining and the legal rules that constrain them, together with supporting data from primary sources. Finally, it evaluates how some forms of federalism bargaining—legitimized by the procedural constraints of mutual consent and the procedural engineering of regard for federalism values—can supplement unilateral interpretation. Differentiating itself from previous process-based claims, the analysis provides new theoretical justification for the interpretive work that federalism bargaining presently provides and calls for greater judicial deference to qualifying examples. Having offered recommendations about the kinds of federalism bargain-ing that should be encouraged, the Article offers recommendations for legislators, executive actors, stakeholders, practitioners, and adjudicators about how best to accomplish these goals.
Among the questions that vex the federalism literature are why states check the federal government and whether Americans identify with the states as well as the nation. This Article argues that partisanship supplies the core of an answer to both questions. Competition between today's ideologically coherent, polarized parties leads state actors to make demands for autonomy, to enact laws rejected by the federal government, and to fight federal programs from within. States thus check the federal government by channeling partisan conflict through federalism's institutional framework. Partisanship also recasts the longstanding debate about whether Americans identify with the states. Democratic and Republican, not state and national, are today's political identities, but the state and federal governments are sites of partisan affiliation. As these governments advance distinct partisan positions, individuals identify with them in shifting, variable ways; states loom particularly large when they are controlled by the party out of power in Washington. States also serve as laboratories of national partisan politics by facilitating competition within each political party. In so doing, they participate in national political contest without forfeiting the particularity and pluralism we associate with the local. By instantiating different partisan positions, moreover, states generate a federalist variant of surrogate representation: individuals across the country may affiliate with states they do not inhabit based on their partisan commitments. Attending to the intersection of partisanship and federalism has implications for a number of doctrinal controversies, such as campaign finance across state lines and access to state public records. The analysis here suggests that porous state borders may enhance states' ability to challenge the federal government and to serve as sites of political identification.
This Essay addresses a gap in the federalism literature. Scholars have offered two distinct visions of federal-state relations. The first depicts states as rivals and challengers to the federal government, roles they play by virtue of being autonomous policymakers outside the federal system. A second vision is offered by scholars of cooperative federalism, who argue that in most areas states serve not as autonomous outsiders, but supportive insiders – servants and allies carrying out federal policy. Legal scholarship has not connected these competing visions to consider how the state's status as servant, insider, and ally might enable it to be a sometime dissenter, rival, and challenger. The literature has not developed a vocabulary for describing how states use regulatory power conferred by the government to resist federal policy, let alone a full account of the implications of this practice. It has thus neglected the possibilities associated with what we call "uncooperative federalism." In this Essay, we provide an initial descriptive and normative account of this undertheorized aspect of our federalism. We also explore what a strong commitment to uncooperative federalism would mean for the doctrines on commandeering and preemption, offering some counterintuitive conclusions about the ways in which weakening the protections for state autonomy might push states to engage in stronger forms of dissent.
Ethiopia adopted ethnic federalism and restructured the regions along ethnic lines as soon as the EPRDF took political power by overthrowing the Marxist military government in 1991. The aim of this paper is to examine the merits and the demerits of federalism. The paper particularly assesses federalism in Africa by taking the case of Ethiopia as an example. The paper argues that in order to ensure the success of federalism, it should not be imposed from above. Since its introduction in 1991 and officially sanctioned in the country's 1994 Constitution, ethnic federalism and Article 39 of the Constitution that awarded the self-rule states (regions) the right to secede has become the major source of intense debate. For some, ethnic federalism and the right to secede discourage ethnic tensions in the country and encourage the various ethnic groups to live together peacefully. However, for others, this "experiment" can go out of hand and may lead the country into never-ending ethnic wars and eventually to disintegration. This paper, by taking into account of Ethiopia's and other countries' experiences, will examine both sides of the arguments.
The United States has had a dual court system since its founding. One might expect such a pronouncement to refer to the division between state and federal courts, but in the early republic the equally obvious referent would have been to the division between courts of common law and the court of chancery — the distinction, that is, between law and equity. This Essay sketches a history of how the distinction between law and equity was gradually transformed into a doctrine of federalism by the Supreme Court. Congress's earliest legislation jealously guarded federal equity against fusion with common law at either the state or federal levels. The antebellum Supreme Court obligingly adopted a strongly anti-fusion stance and took pains to protect federal equity from experimental state-level reforms. In the midst of Reconstruction, Congress reconfigured the ways federal equity would intermix with state law and legal process. But in the twentieth century, Supreme Court doctrine set aside the well-documented legislative history of Reconstruction statutes in favor of a mythic retelling of the 1790s that reduced equity to a principle of federalism. This judicially invented historical narrative has led to a peculiar asymmetry in practice today, where it has become surprisingly easy for federal courts to equitably restrain the other federal branches but significantly difficult for them to redress even extreme violations of federal rights at the state and local level.
The focus of this paper is unequal arrangements and special treatment for some units within Indian federalism, namely. We first explore the conceptual issues – the causes and consequences of asymmetric federalism. Next, we trace the evolution of Indian federalism and analyze the factors contributing to the asymmetric arrangements in political, administrative and fiscal relations. We bring out asymmetric arrangements arising from constitutional arrangements or conventions evolved over the years. Recent political developments and asymmetric treatment due to administrative and political exigencies are also analyzed.
The focus of this paper is unequal arrangements and special treatment for some units within Indian federalism, namely. We first explore the conceptual issues – the causes and consequences of asymmetric federalism. Next, we trace the evolution of Indian federalism and analyze the factors contributing to the asymmetric arrangements in political, administrative and fiscal relations. We bring out asymmetric arrangements arising from constitutional arrangements or conventions evolved over the years. Recent political developments and asymmetric treatment due to administrative and political exigencies are also analyzed.
The ongoing expansion of federal influence over education in the United States provides a particularly salient time to consider how education federalism should be structured to achieve the nation's education goals. One ofthe nation's unfulfilled and yet essential education goals is to ensure that all students receive equal access to an excellent education. A variety of scholars and, most recently, the federal Equity and Excellence Commission have offered proposals for advancing this goal. By building on this growing momentum for reform,I argue that disrupting the nation's longstanding approach to education federalism-which I define as the balance of power between federal, state, and local governments that emphasizes substantial state autonomy over education- is necessary for a successful national effort to achieve this goal. I then provide a foundational theory for strengthening the federal role in education by analyzing the essential elements of a successful reform effort based upon research regarding the strengths of federal education policymaking and upon identification of the missing elements of current reforms. Finally, I respond to many of the potential arguments against disrupting education federalism. For instance, I argue that National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius continues to provide ample room for Congress to expand the federal role in education in ways that are needed to build a more equitable education system. I also explain that although strengthening the federal role in education will reduce some forms of state and local control over education, it also will provide states and localities new forms of control.
The beneficiary of an inheritance has the right to disclaim (i.e., decline) it, within limits ordinarily set by state law. This Article examines situations where a beneficiary's right to disclaim might instead be governed by federal law, as a matter of both existing doctrine and public policy. Issues of federalism arise with regard to disclaimers in several contexts: (1) when a disclaimer would function to defeat a federal tax lien; (2) when a disclaimer could affect a beneficiary's eligibility for Medicaid assistance; (3) when a beneficiary disclaims ERISA pension benefits; and (4) when a beneficiary executes a disclaimer prior to declaring bankruptcy or in the midst of a federal bankruptcy proceeding. The Article begins by developing a theoretical model of the potential costs and benefits of federal preemption, jumping off from prior scholarly discussions of this problem. The Article then addresses, from the perspective of the model, each of the four situations where a disclaimer raises federal concerns. The Article concludes that different policy considerations arise in each situation, depending upon how a disclaimer relates to federal affairs-viz., whether a disclaimer would threaten the financial interests of the federal government, whether those financial interests can be safely delegated to states, whether federal law regulates the kind of property disclaimed, and whether the disclaimer occurs in anticipation of, or within, a specialized federal proceedings. Hence, the four situations addressed in this Article call for no synchronized response from the perspective of federalism but instead demand distinct treatment.
The liberalization of telecommunications and technological change have unbundled a vector of public interventions in this industry. Now different government levels interact. The economics of federalism shed light into this new landscape. The insights from this branch of research are used to analyze the European Union common telecommunications policy (as compared to the history of federal and state regulations in the US) and the role of local and regional powers in the promotion of broadband new generation networks. Decentralized non-specialized policies internalize policy externalities, whereas specialized centralized authority internalizes territorial spillovers. Preliminary empirical evidence shows that decentralization of policies inside member states is not detrimental for broadband investment in the European Union. ; La liberalización de las telecomunicaciones y los cambios tecnológicos han dado lugar a un nuevo vector desagregado de intervenciones públicas en este sector. Dado que en la regulación ahora participan distintos niveles de gobierno, el análisis económico del federalismo puede aportar ideas a este nuevo escenario. Las herramientas de este área de investigación son utilizadas en este trabajo para analizar la política común de telecomunicaciones de la Unión Europea (en comparación con la historia de las regulaciones federal y estatal en los Estados Unidos), así como también el papel de los poderes locales y regionales en la promoción de las redes de nueva generación. Las políticas no especializadas y descentralizadas intenalizan las externalidades que se producen en la interacción de políticas públicas, mientras que las autoridades especializadas y centralizadas internalizan los efectos desbordamiento entre territorios. Alguna evidencia empírica preliminar señala que la descentralización de las políticas dentro de los Estados miembros no perjudica a las inversiones en banda ancha en la UE.
My dissertation introduces a new, positive theory of federalism that explains that the divergence of institutional and individual interests is an important cause of instability in federal systems. This is because, when the interests of state institutions and individual politicians differ, rational, self-interested politicians will pursue their individual interests at their states' expense. My dissertation then applies this theory to the United States. I use two qualitative case studies, education and crime control, to show why this "interest gap" between states and state politicians developed, and further, how the short sighted, self-interested decision-making of state actors contributed to American federalism's decline.
