12 Module 3: Federalism
Objectives
- Define federalism and explain its consequences for American politics and policy.
- Outline what the Constitution says about division of power between national and state governments and states’ obligations to each other, and trace the increasing importance of the national government.
- Characterize the shift from dual to cooperative federalism and the role of fiscal federalism in intergovernmental relations today
- Assess the impact of federalism on democratic government and the scope of government.
Read
- American Government Chapter 3
- Supplemental Reading: US Constitution, 10th Amendment
- Supplemental Reading: US Constitution, Article IV
- Supplemental Reading: AZ Constitution, Article VIII
Chapter Summary
The relationships among the federal, state, and local governments often confuse people, yet federalism is at the heart of critical battles over the nature and scope of public policy in the United States. Neighborhood schools are run by locally elected school boards but also receive state and national funds, and with those funds come state and national rules and regulations. Understanding the scope and nature of local, state, and national governments is thus critical to learning about the development of public policy in the United States.
Defining Federalism
We generally speak of three forms of governmental structures—federalism, unitary government, and confederation. Federalism is a way of organizing a nation so that two or more levels of government have formal authority over the same area and people. Chapter 3 explores the complex relationships between different levels of government in the United States. It describes the ways that the federal system has changed over two centuries of American government and why American federalism is at the center of important battles over policy.
Federalism is not the typical way by which nations organize their governments; there are only 11 countries with federal systems. Figure 3.2 of the text outlines the three most commonly seen government organizations. Most governments in the world today are unitary governments, in which all power resides in the central government. Although American government operates under a federal system at the national level, the states are unitary governments with respect to their local governments. In the United States, local governments are legally “creatures of the states”: They are created by the states and can be changed (or even abolished) by the states.
In a confederation, the national government is weak and most or all of the power is in the hands of its components (such as states). The United States was organized as a confederacy after the American Revolution, with the Articles of Confederation as the governing document. Confederations are rare today except in international organizations.
The concept of intergovernmental relations refers to the entire set of interactions among national, state, and local governments in a federal syste