Why federalism is good

By William A. Galston Close William A. Galston Biography. To Read the Full Story. Subscribe Sign In. To centralize power, to me, is the opposite of becoming more democratic. To become more democratic means that you allow people to have more and more control over the laws and policies that govern them, which is done by putting more control over law creation on the state and local level, rather than putting more of that control in the hands of the federal government, which is about as far away from our ability to determine the laws that govern us as possible.

It would be even more difficult to have control over the laws that govern over our lives if we had a world government and put most control in their hands. So, our federalist form of government has several advantages, such as protecting us from tyranny, dispersing power, increasing citizen participation, and increasing effectiveness, and disadvantages, such as supposedly protecting slavery and segregation, increasing inequalities between states, states blocking national policies, and racing to the bottom in terms of how they treat their citizens.

Do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages? I believe so. I support the system of federalism, agreeing with the benefits, and doing my best to give counterarguments to the disadvantages, in order to negate them. Summary Advantages and Disadvantages of Federalism.

Practices pragmatism: Running a country the size of the United States, with such a diverse population, is much easier to do if power is given to local officials. Likewise, state and local officials are closer to the problems of their areas, so it makes sense for them to choose policies to solve those problems.

Creates laboratories of democracy: State governments can experiment with policies, and other states and the federal government can learn from their successes and failures. What do I mean? Consider the issue of what level of government is responsible for the financing of fire houses. Suppose that the effective range or impact of the firehouses is 5 km and that the firehouse is located in a jurisdiction of 10 km see diagram.

If there are more voters in the central jurisdiction, then they can foist some of the taxes for the fire station on taxpayers in the outer jurisdiction. Since the benefits of the firehouse go solely to the central jurisdiction but the costs are spread across both jurisdictions, the central jurisdiction is being subsidized and thus has an incentive to spend more on firehouses than is justified by the actual benefits.

This is what we mean by pork barrel legislation. Thus, we get too many museums devoted to Lawrence Welk. A great cost to us all. In this case the central jurisdiction may have too little spent on firehouses. Note also that the subsidiarity principle also implies that decentralization can go too far.

If we split the central district into two, then there could be wasteful duplication of services; two firehouses when one would do. Similarly when dealing with public goods the subsidiarity principle implies that the public goods with the largest extensive range should be supplied by the political jurisdiction with the largest extensive range.

National defense is the obvious example. If national defense were left to the states each state would have an incentive to free ride on the provision of defense by the others. If New York pays for a nuclear missile, then why should New Jersey pay for anything at all? When we think of federalism we naturally think of the federal government and the states, but the principles that motivate federalism apply at all levels, and we should be imaginative in thinking about how political units can be designed to match impact jurisdictions.

There is no reason, for example, why the political unit that determines fire expenditures need be the same as the unit that determines water or school expenditures and indeed in the United States in addition to national, state and local governments there are many thousands of special districts that are often functionally organized and that control areas such as water, streets, lighting and so forth. Oppression at the federal level is difficult to escape.

Oppression by the states can be countered by mobility. The more powers that are devolved to lower levels, the easier it becomes pick and choose policies by moving. Gays may move to cities like San Francisco where they are better tolerated, and indeed if enough of them move they can become a political force.

In this respect, the idea is similar to the diversity of preferences notion except there the emphasis was on the idea that federalism allows pre-existing diversities to be recognized. Whereas here the idea is that you can move to a city or town that better reflects your preferences. One sometimes hears, for example, that federalism was more important in the 18th century when the people of Virginia really were quite different than the people of New England.

Today, so the argument goes, now that people are much more likely to move from one state to another the differences are less clear and so federalism is less important. While this argument makes some sense from the diversity of preference view, it makes no sense at all from the perspective of mobility because it is mobility that generates differences in preferences and competitive federalism works better the more mobile citizens are.

The availability of the exit option, guaranteed by the central government, would effectively place limits on the ability of the state-provincial governments to exploit citizens.

Federalism serves the dual purpose of allowing the range or scope for central government activity to be curtailed and, at the same time, limiting the potential for citizen exploitation by state-provincial units.