federalism and intergovernmental relations

TYPES OF GOVERNMENTS

Unitary where power division between federal government and states don't exist, only a unitary form. Ex. United Kingdom, China, Japan and France.

Federal - Ex. United states, india, and Germany.

Confederations was the United States’ first form of government. This includes a looser configuration of countries that are obligated to each other legally. There's less power involved compared to the other two but still maintains a form of government that is reliable. On the other hand, back then with the United States found that the confederation is once strong enough to keep the colonies together; there wasn't a mechanism in place to make sure the colonies could work together for when the self-interest of states wouldn't over power others.

STRENGTHS OF THE UNITARY SYSTEM?

  1. There's not a lot of back and forth across the system because there's one government; the national direction is very clear.

  2. No question about who is responsible. For example, during Katrina, it was clear that the state was responsible for providing services for restoration.

  3. There are no duplications in the institution; there are no sub-units making all the laws for example.

  4. There's no major difference in raising and spending money because it's all based on one system

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ADVANTAGES

  1. A promotion for a diverse approach and experimentation is happening. For example, however each state can individually find ways to deal with clean water and/or air is okay.

  2. An abundance of debates leads to smaller steps toward change and a lot of people agree that this is more preferable.

  3. Considers the differences in cultural groupings that might predominate a particular state (e.g., Quebec)

  4. The federal, state and local governmental system allows for closeness to it or a better entry points to democracy in the United States

  5. Make sure that stronger regions like the New York's and other powerful states didn't overwhelm weaker regions

MANDATES

Mandates are rules or expenditures that are part of our federal system that lower levels of government is required to follow. But what do you do when there is a policy or a mandate that requires financial support you don't have? That's where, in the middle of the 1990s, there was a pushback against it. hence, the unfunded mandate reform Act of 1995 was born and this reform argues that the minute a law and an expenditure becomes too expensive, the federal government has to find a way to pay for it.

HISTORICAL UNDERSTANDINGS OF FEDERALISM

Federalism has changed over the years into many outcomes:

It started with Dual Federalism, where both the state and federal government functioned independently of one another which made it came off as if they were ignoring each other. The Great depression highlighted the fact that this outcome or understanding of federalism didn't work anymore.

The next phase is called Cooperative Federalism. This is the era where the states and cities didn't know what to do during the Great Depression once again because they don't have the money to deal with these grand problems. So this new deal or understanding allowed the federal and state governments to work together to solve these problems.

This next change called Creative Federalism, most notable during the 1960s. An amazing example of this type of Federalism is the great society programs of the Lyndon Johnson administration. Lyndon Johnson, during this time, passed many legislations: Medicare, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, etc. President Johnson established more legislation than any other president before him. Push back, however, came from the states as a result of these legislations because most of the acute problems were happening in the cities. We started seeing decades of urban decay in this era and the belief that we should do something about it formed (e.g., improving the infrastructure and the physical environment; improve issues related to the continuing decay or the minorities in poor neighborhoods. What starts to happen now is the federal government bike passes the states and work directly with the cities which comes with a lot of money to the cities.

The New Federalism is basically a change in philosophy that we kind of deal with still: weekend during the Nixon administration and beyond, there's a belief that we need to change the way the federal government funds lower governments. In other words, instead of giving phones in the form of categorial or highly specific grants that need to be used on specific services and programs, let's give states the autonomy on how they spend their money.

Now, the Reagan administration forms an understanding from New Federalism called New New Federalism that gave a notion to continue what the Nixon administration does but decrease the amount of money that is coming from the federal government. They wanted to try to stop the dependence all together.

Now we're in an era some people call cutthroat federalism or collaborative federalism where it's very competitive because the cities and states know that they have to compete with other states and cities for funding and if you don’t cooperate you're going to miss out in the competition.