Federalism: Political Identity and Tragic Compromise

Chapter 3. Federalism in Political Science

chapter three federalism in political science The previous two chapters presented, in generalized terms, a theoretical approach to federalism. We began by de‹ning the concept of federalism as a grant of partial autonomy to geographical subunits of a nation and by distinguishing it from closely associated, but basically different , institutional arrangements, such as consociation, decentralization, and democracy. We then proceeded to argue that federalism, once carefully de‹ned, is not some sort of “grand design” but a political expedient to which groups of people resort when they lack a uni‹ed political identity but ‹nd themselves, for pragmatic or historical reasons, living within the borders of a single polity. We further argued that there is a tragic character to this expedient, because it purchases political unity through a mechanism that leaves some groups, if not all groups, dissatis‹ed with the resulting structure of the polity. As stated in this book’s introduction, it is our view that an analysis of this sort is needed because so many existing approaches to federalism are inadequately theorized. They present contingent arguments about why federalism is obligatory or optional, desirable or undesirable, or democratic or undemocratic in a particular country or situation, without offering a general framework that explains the what and why of federalism. In this chapter, we try to demonstrate our assertion by discussing other approaches to federalism that aspire to some degree of generality and by contrasting them with the theory just presented. These approaches are generally found within the discipline of political science. American legal scholarship includes an extensive discussion of federalism , which will be considered in chapters 4–5, but most of it centers on 69 interpretations of America’s particular founding document or on the pragmatic advantages and disadvantages of federalism for the American mode of government. The political science literature at least attempts to analyze federalism as a general governmental mechanism that can be deployed in a variety of circumstances. Because this literature is large and sprawling, we focus on three separate traditions—process federalism, ‹scal federalism, and public choice theory and positive political theory—that together include much of the most salient and well-regarded work in the ‹eld. Needless to say, these three traditions do not constitute neat or mutually exclusive categories, nor do they encompass the entirety of contemporary federalism scholarship. But as we understand them, they include and capture much of the most familiar and most well-regarded academic writing on this subject. process federalism Process federalism, so labeled by Carl Friedrich,1 encompasses a vast body of literature that emerged in the wake of the decolonialization and nationbuilding efforts following World War II. What nations need in order to survive , according to this literature, is politically legitimate and functionally effective government. Federalism evolves or can be instituted to achieve this purpose. Students of federalism used functionalism to account for the evolution of federalism in the United States over time and for the variety of forms that it had taken elsewhere around the world. For instance, political scientist Daniel Elazar spent most of his long and distinguished career showing how process federalism was a functional response to different conditions in different settings around the world. American historians used functional analysis to account for the dynamics of American federalism over time,2 while pragmatically oriented political scientists, confronting the permanence of big government, embraced it in an effort to understand the tangled relations among the bewildering variety of local, county, state, special district, and national governments.3 It was also adopted by American legal scholars of the so-called legal process school as a way of understanding the meaning of the U.S. Constitution without having to resort to arcane historical inquiries associated with original intent or hyperscholastic exercises of textual analysis.4 The idea of federalism as a functional process resonated with all of them, and Friedrich’s approach found its way into their theories. 70 federalism Friedrich, Elazar, and their colleagues drew inspiration from the work of Johannes Althusius, the seventeenth-century political philosopher who is often identi‹ed as the father of modern federalism. In his celebrated book Politicia (1603), Althusius argued that a “federal union” is a form of government erected on an ordered hierarchy of successive levels of community , from the family through the state.5 He envisioned the village as a federal union of families, the town as a federation of guilds, the province...