04 January 2008
Governing at the State and Local Levels
The following material is an excerpt from the October 2005 IIP publication About America: How the United States Is Governed.
State governments are not subunits of the federal government. Each state is sovereign and does not report in any constitutional way to the federal government. The U.S. Constitution and federal law, however, supersede state constitutions and state laws in areas in which state laws are in disagreement with the Constitution.
The U.S. Constitution guarantees each state a republican form of government -- that is, a government run by popularly elected representatives of the people. State governments generally mirror the federal government: In each state there is an elected head of the executive branch (the governor), an independent judiciary and a popularly elected legislative branch.
Each state constitution provides for the establishment of local governmental entities. In all states, these local entities include counties and cities, but most states also provide for other types of local government, including wards, school districts, conservation districts, townships and transportation authorities. These special types of local government have regulatory, administrative or taxing authority as defined in the state constitution or in state law.
There are more than 500,000 elected officials in the United States. Of these, fewer than 8,500 are at the national and state level. The rest are local government officials -- city council members, school board members, mayors, sheriffs and an array of other individuals who serve in various capacities.
