Japan, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Hungary, and the Philippines.
unitary systems governments in which all power is centralized
Politics in Britain, for example, works very differently from politics in the United States, partly due to the different rules that organize central and local governments. Most important decisions are made in London, from foreign policy to housing policy—even the details of what ought to be included in the school curriculum. Even local taxes are determined centrally. When Margaret Thatcher, then the British prime minister, believed that some municipal units in London were not supportive of her government’s policies, she simply dissolved the administrative units. Similarly, in 1972, when the legislature in Northern Ireland (a part of the United Kingdom) could not resolve its religious conflicts, the central government suspended the local lawmaking body and ruled Northern Ireland from London. These actions are tantamount to a Republican president’s dissolving a Democratic state that disagreed with his policies, or the national government’s deciding during the days of segregation to suspend the state legislature in Alabama and run the state from Washington. Such an arrangement has been impossible in the United States except during the chaotic state of emergency following the Civil War. What is commonplace under a unitary system is unimaginable under our federal rules.
Confederal Systems
Confederal systems provide an equally sharp contrast to federal systems, even though the names sound quite similar. In confederal systems, the local units hold all the power, and the central government is dependent on them for its existence. The local units remain sovereign, and the central government has only as much power as they allow it to have. Examples of confederal systems include America under the Articles of Confederation and associations such as the United Nations and the European Union, twenty-eight European nations that have joined economic and political forces. The European Union has been experiencing problems much like ours after the Revolutionary War, debating whether it ought to move in a more federal direction. Most of the nations involved, jealously guarding their sovereignty, say no.
confederal systems governments in which local units hold all the power
What Difference Does Federalism Make?
That our founders settled on federalism, rather than a unitary or a confederal system, makes a great deal of difference to American politics. Federalism gave the founders a national government that could take effective action, restore economic stability, and regulate disputes among the states, while allowing the states considerable autonomy. Still, federalism forces the states to continually negotiate their relationships not only with the national government but also with each other. Even though they have the ability to act independently in many respects, they have to be able to cooperate effectively and, frequently, to compete with each other. States are always looking to use their resources in creative ways to win scarce federal benefits, to lure business and economic development opportunities, and to encourage people to relocate within their borders.
Federalism gives both the national government and the states a good measure of flexibility when it comes to experimentation with public policy. If all laws and policies need not be uniform across the country, then different states may try different solutions to common problems and share the results of their experiments, making states what a Supreme Court justice once referred to as the “laboratories of democracy.”9 For instance, the popularity and success of the health care policy passed in Massachusetts under Gov. Mitt Romney in 2006 became the model for President Obama’s Affordable Care Act four years later.
In addition, the flexibility that federalism provides can also be helpful when Congress cannot or will not act. As recent polarization in the nation’s capital has essentially paralyzed legislative action for most purposes, it leaves a power vacuum that enterprising states can take advantage of. For example, as Congress has gridlocked over the development of fossil fuel resources, the states have leapt into the breach with their own energy policies, many times reflecting the political proclivities of the dominant party in the states. For example, Republican-controlled Pennsylvania has encouraged fracking (the process of pumping water and chemicals into deposits to free gas and oil bound up in rock formations) while neighboring New York, and to a lesser extent Ohio, which share the giant Marcellus Shale deposit, have taken a much more environmentally cautious approach to the development of shale deposits.10
However, it is not only units of government but also individuals who stand to benefit from power sharing between nation and states. Federalism means there is real power at levels of government that are close to the citizens. Citizens can thus have access to officials and processes of government that they could not have if there were just one distant, effective unit. Federalism allows government to preserve local standards and to respond to local needs—that is, to solve problems at the levels where they occur. Examples include local traffic laws, community school policies, and city and county housing codes.
Federalism is not a perfect system, however, and it has some disadvantages. Where policies are made and enforced locally, all economies of scale are lost. Many functions are also repeated across the country as states administer national programs locally. Different penalties for the same crime can make it difficult to gauge the consequences of one’s behavior across states, as we saw in the What’s at Stake . . . ? in this chapter. Most problematic is the fact that federalism permits, even encourages, local prejudices to find their way into law. Until the national government took enforcement of civil rights legislation into its own hands in the 1960s, federalism allowed southern states to practice segregation. Before the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, women could vote in some states but not others. Similarly, before the Supreme Court ruling in 2015 that made marriage equality the law of the land, LGBTQ Americans did not have the same rights in all localities of the United States—although they could marry in states like Massachusetts, Iowa, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and the District of Columbia, they did not even have the right to join in civil unions in many other states. To the degree that states have more rather than less power, the uniform enforcement of civil rights cannot be guaranteed.
Overall, federalism has proved to be a flexible and effective compromise for American government. The United States is not the only nation with a federal system, although other countries may distribute power among their various units differently from the way we do. Germany, Canada, Mexico, Australia, and Switzerland are all examples of federal systems.
In Your Own Words
Identify the ways in which federalism divides power between national and state governments.
American Federalism Over Time: Constitutional ambiguity and the role of the Supreme Court
Although the Constitution provides for both national powers and state powers (as well as some shared powers), the balance between the two has changed considerably since it was written. Because of the founders’ disagreement over how power should be distributed in the new country, the final wording about national and state powers was intentionally kept vague, which probably helped the Constitution get ratified. Because it wasn’t clear how much power the different levels held, it has been possible ever since for both ardent Federalists and states’ rights advocates to find support for their positions in the document.
That very vagueness has opened the door for the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution’s meaning. Those interpretations have varied along with the people sitting on the Court and with historical circumstances. As the context of American life has been transformed through events such as the end of slavery and the Civil War, the process of industrialization and the growth of big business, the economic collapse of the Great Depression in the 1930s and the
