02 January 2007
Federalism Checks the Power of the Central Government
Historian discusses interplay of state and national governments
The following article, by David J. Bodenhamer, originally appeared in Democracy Papers. Bodenhamer is professor of history and executive director of the Polis Center at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis. He is the author or editor of six books, including Fair Trial: Rights of the Accused in American History (1992) and The Bill of Rights in Modern America: After 200 Years (1993), with James W. Ely Jr.
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Federalism and Democracy
By David J. Bodenhamer
The 2000 presidential contest was one of the most closely divided -- and confusing -- elections in American history. Not until a month after voters cast their ballots did it became certain that Republican candidate George W. Bush would claim the title of the nation's 43rd president. In the interim, the world watched as the fight for votes in Florida repeatedly bounced from local to state to federal courts and back again, before a U.S. Supreme Court decision settled the matter. What many foreign observers found puzzling was how voting standards could vary so much from place to place or how local officials could play such an important role in a national election.
American citizens also may have been surprised by the differences in voting procedures from state to state, but the interplay of local, state, and national governments scarcely could have seemed unusual. Few days pass when ordinary people in the United States do not encounter the laws or actions of all three levels of government. Zoning, traffic control, sanitation, educational administration, street repair and a hundred other services all are managed primarily by local officials, acting under a grant of authority from the state.
State government controls much educational policy, criminal justice, business and professional regulation, public health, among a variety of other important areas. And the acts of national government -- from defense and foreign affairs to economic and monetary policy to welfare reform -- are staples of the daily news everywhere because of their wide impact.
Although few people recognized it at the time, both the drama of the last presidential election and countless lesser dramas of everyday life are acted out on a stage erected by the framers of the U.S. Constitution more than 200 years earlier. As colonists, the Founding Fathers had chafed under the authority imposed by the distant British imperial government and had come to view centralized power as a threat to their rights and liberties. As a result, the major problem facing the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 was how to restrict the power of the central government, yet provide it with sufficient authority to protect the national interest. Dividing power between two levels of government -- national and state -- was one of the solutions to this problem. This system of divided power, federalism, widely is acknowledged not only to be a unique American contribution to the theory of government but part of the genius of the American constitutional system itself.
DEFINING FEDERALISM
Federalism is a system of shared power between two or more governments with authority over the same people and geographical area. Unitary systems of government, by far the most common form around the world, have only one source of power, the central or national government. Although democracy can flourish under either system, the differences between the two types of governments are real and significant. Great Britain, for example, has a unitary government. Its Parliament has ultimate authority over all things that occur within the United Kingdom. Even if it delegates power over local matters, Parliament can require its towns or counties to do whatever it deems appropriate; it can even abolish them or change their boundaries if it chooses to do so.
In the United States, the situation is quite different. Laws of the national government, located in Washington, apply to any individual who lives within the national boundaries, while laws in each of the 50 states apply to residents of those states alone. Under the U.S. Constitution, Congress does not have the power to abolish a state nor can a state assume a power intended for the national government alone. Under American federalism, in fact, the U.S. Constitution is the source of authority for both national and state governments. This document, in turn, reflects the will of the American people, the ultimate power in a democracy.
CENTRAL GOVERNMENT VS. STATE GOVERNMENT
In a federal nation, the central government has defined powers, with full sovereignty over external affairs. The exercise of authority in domestic affairs is more complicated. Under the Constitution, the U.S. government has exclusive power to regulate interstate and foreign commerce, coin money, provide for the naturalization of immigrants and maintain an army or navy, among other things. The United States guarantees to every state a republican form of government, thus ensuring that no state can create, say, a monarchy. These areas are ones in which national interests clearly supersede state interests and are properly reserved for the national government. The national government also has judicial authority to resolve controversies between two or more states and between the citizens of different states.
In other areas of domestic policy, however, the central and state governments may have parallel or overlapping interests or needs. Here, power may be exercised simultaneously by both state and national governments; chief among these concurrent powers is the power to tax. And in areas where the Constitution is silent regarding national authority, states may act provided they do not conflict with powers the central government may legally exercise. On large and important subjects that affect citizens in their daily lives -- education, crime and punishment, health and safety -- the Constitution fails to assign direct responsibility. According to the republican principles that guided the founding generation, especially the theories of 17th-century British philosopher John Locke, the people reserved these powers, which they delegated to the states through the various state constitutions.
A RECIPE FOR AVOIDING CONFLICT
The framers of the Constitution recognized the potential for conflict between the two levels of government, especially in the use of concurrent powers, and they adopted several strategies to avoid it. First, the U.S. Constitution was made supreme over state constitutions, a condition made enforceable through federal courts. It included a clause that declared the actions of the national government supreme whenever its constitutional use of power clashed with the legitimate actions of the states. The document also explicitly prohibited states from exercising certain powers that were granted to the central government. And, as part of the campaign to win ratification of the Constitution, the framers agreed to support a Bill of Rights, the first 10 amendments, to restrain the national government from interfering with individual liberties.
The Constitution laid the ground rules for relationships among states by listing the reciprocal obligations the states owed each other, and it made any newly admitted state equal with the original states. Finally, the states were represented in the national government itself by equal representation in the U.S. Senate, the upper house of Congress. In all of these ways, the Founding Fathers sought to mitigate conflict among the several governments in the United States.
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT EXPANDS
The role of the central government within the federal system continued to expand during the last half of the 20th century. The Supreme Court reversed the prevailing interpretation of the 14th Amendment that narrowly defined the scope of national power, and extended federal oversight in areas of crime and punishment, social welfare, race relations and equal protection of the laws. By the end of the century, scarcely an area existed that national power did not reach. The effect perhaps was most apparent in the words most people chose when asked to identify their citizenship. Throughout most of the nation's history, a significant number of citizens identified their primary allegiance with a state; by the end of the 20th century, national citizenship was prized more often.
The revolution in federalism did not end debates about the proper distribution of power between the states and the national government. Disagreements about the proper role of national and state governments within the federal system continue to be an important part of American politics. Virtually no domestic issue is untouched by conflict over what level of government has authority to shape or implement policies relating to it. No longer is it easy to distinguish between the functions of state and national governments, because the current federal system tends to blend responsibilities and blur distinctions in response to complex social and economic issues.
THE VIRTUES OF POWER DIVISION
Today, power and policy assignments are shared in what scholars label cooperative federalism. This feature of American life is so well established that it occurs even when the two levels of government are in conflict, as happened in the 1960s when Southern states cooperated on building the interstate highway system while resisting federally mandated racial integration. What makes cooperative federalism possible are several operating procedures, including shared costs, federal guidelines and shared administration. Congress agrees to pay part of the costs for programs that are in the national interest but benefit primarily the inhabitants of a single state or region. Among these programs are highways, sewage treatment plants, airports, and other improvements to state or local infrastructure.
The federal grant comes with a set of guidelines that states must adopt and enforce to receive the money. Concerned about drunken driving, for instance, Congress made the receipt of federal highway dollars contingent on a state enacting a lower blood alcohol limit as part of its traffic laws. Finally, state and local officials implement federal policies, but under programs of their own design and through their own bureaucracy. Job retraining is one such program, with each state developing and administering a program funded by federal dollars to meet the specific needs of its citizens.
Lessons for Democracy
What lessons does the American experience with federalism offer to democratic governments elsewhere?
• Vesting power in two levels of government, dividing it by making each level supreme in its separate sphere, was one solution to the problem of how to grant necessary authority to government without creating such concentrated power that liberty would suffer.
• Federalism's ability to accommodate local issues also contributes to democracy by decentralizing policies and politics. States can adopt widely varying policies on the same problem, thereby providing the means for citizens to live in a state where the policy suits their moral or cultural values.
• The states often are called laboratories of democracy, and for good reason. Innovative programs and policies from welfare and educational reform to health and safety regulation repeatedly have come first from state governments. Long before the national government acted, a number of states abolished slavery, extended the right to vote to women, African Americans, and 18-year-olds, and provided for the direct election of U.S. senators, among other reforms.
• A federal system also expands participation in politics and government: the more levels of government, the greater the opportunity to vote and hold office. Many of these offices are training grounds for future national leadership.
• Additional levels of government also increase access to decision-making in ways other than holding office. Interest groups blocked from influence at one level of government may find a better reception for their ideas at another level. During the 1950s and 1960s, civil rights advocates faced strong opposition from Southern states that opposed racial integration, but they found support in the national government for their efforts to achieve racial equality.
• Finally, federalism enhances democracy by providing a platform for effective criticism and opposition to governmental policies and practices. A political party out of power nationally still may capture state and local offices that allow it to challenge national priorities or decisions.
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