Elazar places these different traditions under the rubric known as political culture. In his analysis, Elazar identifies three major categories of political and social relationships: individualistic , moralistic , and traditionalistic.
Individualistic political culture fits well within the classical liberal tradition of non-centralized federalism. Within individualistic political cultures, most problems are seen in terms of individual solutions — communal solutions are not highly valued. Individualistic traditions look at most problems in terms of private property rights dilemmas.
Solutions, therefore, are viewed as being best identified through the proper transfer of rights. In individualistic political cultures, non-centralized federalism would largely mean limited government at all levels and reliance on the marketplace to meet demands or solve problems. In moralistic political cultures, problems and solutions are viewed quite a bit differently.
Moralists tend to see problems in terms of community dilemmas that must be identified through interchange and community choice. Solutions are proffered in an open public forum and agreement on solutions is generally seen as best determined through widespread mutual agreement.
The New England town hall meeting is often held up as a classic example of governance in a moralistic political culture. Non-centralized federalism, therefore, is more likely to be viewed as the optimum method of creating an inclusive public dialogue about government and governing. Moralistic political culture is horizontally organized, placing significant emphasis on the role of all individuals regardless of their social status or economic position within society.
Traditionalistic political culture is vertically organized, which means that individuals in positions of power have greater influence in the decision-making process than individuals who hold lower political, social or economic status.
In traditionalistic political cultures, a limited view of collective decision-making excludes most citizen-stakeholder voices in the governance process. Citizens in a traditionalistic political culture tend not to expect to play a role in governance at the state and local level—they tend to defer to the aforementioned elites.
In traditionalistic political culture, non-centralized federalism may work to the disadvantage of the mass while benefiting elites and their allies. According to Elazar, traditionalistic political cultures are most prominent in the American South. While conditions have changed a great deal over the last several decades, poverty in the South and responses to poverty provide a solid example of the negative impact of traditionalistic political culture. Traditionalistic elites in the rural South chose to ignore poverty as an issue for reasons related to racial discrimination and contempt of elites for the lower social classes.
National government intervention was the first major step towards alleviating poverty in the South, albeit the issues of institutionalized racism and endemic poverty have not entirely faded from the political scene, either in the South or in many other areas of the country.
Based on compelling evidence produced through political culture theory and considerable social science, moralistic political culture presents the greatest opportunity for equal access and broadly inclusive dialogue, and widely accepted choices and outcomes. When considering conflict in relation to the non-centralized federalism model, an underlying assumption is that the scope of conflict will be largely contained to the state or local level.
In moralistic political cultures, governance is constructed in a way where support for public solutions to identified collective dilemmas is initially strong and remains strong on a consistent and prolonged basis.
Individualistic political cultures are less likely to identify problems as requiring collective action — the marketplace is seen as the provider of solutions to individual wants and needs and property rights exchange. As a consequence, a strong central government is not a likely solution for the individualist. Conflict in an individualistic political culture will arise over issues related to property rights exchange and are less likely to be contained at the local level.
Non-centralized federalism leads to highly biased governance choices and outcomes. Two major conditions led to dramatic change in the character of federalism in the U.
First, as discussed in Chapter 1, technology has forever changed the way in which governance occurs. Computers are a central part of the governance process at all levels of government today. Initially, computer networks were within a single office and were not connected to other networks. With the advent of the Internet, inter-office networks have expanded exponentially and are increasingly complex — a web of communication connects the government to individuals and to the private sectors.
Technology has made it relatively inexpensive and rather easy to transmit large quantities of information very quickly between decision makers in various government offices, and in the process influence choices and create opportunities for coordination and collaboration across jurisdictions.
Inter-state and inter-local partnerships or compacts and agreements of understanding to coordinate efforts and goals have become a prominent aspect of 21st century federalism. Events related to terrorism and terrorist plots do not honor jurisdictional boundaries. In attacking enemies, terrorist organizations often use the same technological tools that have made our lives easier—the Internet, rapid forms of transportation, and the ability to network globally.
Homeland Security policies require interagency communication and collaboration as a condition of the receipt of federal funding. It is the case, of course, that delays in communications posed by jurisdictional squabbles can significantly reduce the ability of government at all levels to plan for and react to emergencies in a timely and effective manner.
A related condition has been the decline of the traditional fiscal federalism relationship. In the s and s, policy goals of the national government—in cooperation with state and local government —were supported with financial resources received from the federal government. This fiscal federalism relationship meant that new policy goals were not as burdensome to state and local government in cost terms as they had been in the past. Beginning with the Reagan and G.
Bush presidencies, and moving forward into the Clinton, G. Bush and Obama eras, the monetary taps of fiscal federalism have decreased: federal resources are now in much more limited supply. How is network federalism different than other forms of federalism? First, network federalism arrangements are often decentralized to the level of the individual or informal team.
Individuals may be assigned to formal organizations, but most of their work is based on highly situational informal relationships or teams that respond to circumstances. For example, law enforcement response to riots and natural disasters is often a function of changing circumstances.
Second, the strength of coupling or formal control within and between levels of government or agencies is very limited. Third, power is informally distributed and redistributed depending upon need rather than convention that had been based on formal vertical power distribution. There are at least three advantages to the newly emerging model of network federalism:. While network federalism sounds like a laudatory solution, there are at least three potential challenges that must be considered in the years to come:.
Federalism can, and frequently does, work towards the accomplishment of the core goals of sustainability. In the U. Strong social capital and the collective action of civic-minded communities are often associated with effective and adaptable government. The economic objectives dimension sustainability is also served by federalism. Sustainable economics means managing resources at the local level, where citizens are more likely to witness the production process at work and can better scrutinize the sustainability of the economic process in relation to negative environmental impacts produced.
Understanding the true costs and benefits of achieving what is wanted may refocus local consumer attention on which goods and services really do contribute to sustainability. The environmental dimension of sustainability can benefit from federalism as well. With multiple points of citizen-government interaction, federalism offers greater opportunity to raise awareness of policies that could damage environmental quality. Additionally, local management of the environment and common resources may give citizens greater responsibility for the resources from which they collectively derive benefit—good stewardship practiced by multiple actors in a federal system of governance may serve to remind all parties involved of the many different stakeholders who benefit from well-protected environmental resources.
Finally, the institutional dimension of sustainability is well served by federalism. While the desirable values undergirding those institutions might be known—e. For example, network federalism promises to take governance in new and exciting directions; yet, the exact nature of those new and exciting directions will be shaped by the technology of tomorrow. Federalism offers the opportunity to experiment with different institutional designs, to determine what works best, when, and for what purpose.
Because education is such an important and expensive function with federal, state and school district levels of governance involved through regulation and finance, informed participation in school board meetings and voting on school funding necessitates some investigation. Contact your local school district to see how federal, state and local governments are involved in financing education.
Attend your local school board meeting to learn about pressing issues facing the school district. Contact your state legislators and state department of education to learn how federal government regulations, such as the No Child Left Behind Act, affect state education policy. Contact a K teacher in your local school district to discuss how federal, state and local policies affect how they teach in their own classroom.
Readers of this book who are preparing for careers in state or local government or who will work closely with government in one capacity or another will likely deal directly with intergovernmentalism. Contemporary American federalism badly needs a realignment here. For the often indiscriminate preoccupation of national policymakers with the details of local administration is not just wasteful; it can be irresponsible. Let us glance at a small sample of local functions now monitored by federal agencies and courts.
Several of these illustrations may sound farcical, but none is apocryphal. The directives for firefighters, for example, are among the many fastidious standards formulated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. The pettifogging about where to stand in buses is a Department of Transportation regulation, which, believe it or not, reads as follows:.
Tangents like these are baffling. If municipal transit authorities or fire departments cannot be left to decide such particulars, what, if anything, are local governments for? Surely, most of the matters in question—putting out a fire, taking a bus ride, disciplining a troublemaker in school, removing hazards like asbestos or lead from a school or a house—rarely spill across jurisdictions and so do not justify intervention by a higher order of government. Before Congress acted to rid the Republic of asbestos, the great majority of states already had programs to find and remove the potentially hazardous substance.
Long before the U. Environmental Protection Agency promulgated expensive new rules to curb lead poisoning, state and municipal code enforcement departments were also working to eliminate this danger to the public health.
Why the paternalists in Washington cannot resist dabbling in the quotidian tasks that need to be performed by state and local officials would require a lengthy treatise on bureaucratic behavior, congressional politics, and judicial activism. Suffice it to say that the propensity, whatever its source, poses at least two fundamental problems.
The first is that some state and local governments may become sloppier about fulfilling their basic obligations. The Hurricane Katrina debacle revealed how ill-prepared the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana were for a potent tropical storm that could inundate the region.
There were multiple explanations for this error, but one may well have been habitual dependence of state and local officials on direction, and deliverance, by Uncle Sam. In Louisiana, a state that was receiving more federal aid than any other for Army Corps of Engineers projects, the expectation seemed to be that shoring up the local defenses against floods was chiefly the responsibility of Congress and the Corps, and that if the defenses failed, bureaucrats in the Federal Emergency Management Agency would instantly ride to the rescue.
That assumption proved fatal. Relentlessly pressured to spend money on other local projects, and unable to plan centrally for every possible calamity that might occur somewhere in this huge country, the federal government botched its role in the Katrina crisis every step of the way—the flood prevention, the response, and the recovery.
The local authorities in this tragedy should have known better, and taken greater precautions. Apart from creating confusion and complacency in local communities, a second sort of disorder begot by a national government too immersed in their day-to-day minutia is that it may become less mindful of its own paramount priorities.
Consider an obvious one: the security threat presented by Islamic extremism. This should have been the U. The prelude to September 11, was eventful and ominous. Muslim militants had tried to hijack an airliner and crash it into the Eiffel Tower in Courtesy of Al Qaeda, truck bombings at the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in caused thousands of casualties.
And so it went, year after year. What is remarkable was not that the jihadists successfully struck the Twin Towers again in the fall of but that the United States and its allies threw no forceful counterpunches during the preceding decade, and that practically nothing was done to prepare the American people for the epic struggle they would have to wage.
Instead, the Clinton administration and both parties in Congress mostly remained engrossed in domestic issues, no matter how picayune or petty. Neither of the presidential candidates in the election seemed attentive to the fact that the country and the world were menaced by terrorism. When united with the English traditions of liberty and the rule of law, it has produced not only an unprecedented measure of individual freedom, but also a huge and unsurpassed increase in the material well-being of the people.
Still, elitism has never conceded defeat, and in the s we started to see the sprouting of a hybrid of the old Platonic plant, and it is now in a position of dominance among the political class. This is a model that lies somewhere between the poles of democracy and elitism, a model in which the power of an enlightened minority is thought to be necessary to help a democracy to survive and progress.
This new wave of elitism has gained momentum from the trend towards globalisation. Incredibly, Australia supported that initiative at the time, but it ran into the sand eventually, becoming an obsolete proposal with the growth of the Internet and the fax and so on.
UNESCO is once again, I notice, looking for other ways to revive that idea, particularly by finding ways of controlling or censoring the Internet. This is quite an interesting example.
Wherever you see these dismissive references to public debate and these attempts to channel or guide or control political comment in the media, you know for sure that you are in the presence of elitism. It is a sure guide, a favourite—so are identity cards, incidentally, which is something else we had experience of in this country a few years ago. Control of the media is a sure litmus test of elitism.
It is interesting, because we have seen it promoted in Australia in recent years from the s onwards. Elitist politicians since then have repeatedly attempted to instil an elitist version of the doctrine of free speech, under which the government would influence which political issues were debated, and who would debate them. In August-September , the Whitlam government proposed a scheme whereby newspapers would be granted a licence to publish, and this licence would be granted or cancelled by a government body.
The wave of fear that it generated was a material factor in the constitutional crisis of , although you never hear it referred to in media accounts of those events. The idea was shelved in , but it was taken off the shelf again in with the Political Broadcasts and Political Disclosures Act, which prohibited all political advertising—paid or unpaid—on radio or television in the period leading up to an election.
Blocks of free airtime were to be allocated to approved parties, again by a government body. The Act was overturned by the High Court, [24] but supporters of the idea are again looking for other ways of the government influencing and channelling political debate. These ideas, if they succeed, would be very detrimental to Australian democracy.
The philosopher William James and many after him have pointed out that in our search for reliable information we are guided by the questions that arise during argument about a given course of action. It is only through the test of debate that we come to understand what we know and what we still need to learn. This participatory character of federalism does lead to more abundant political debate at all levels, but critics of federalism don't like that.
In that sense, debate and conflict are an inescapable part of civilised life. As Campbell Sharman points out, federalism's more open structure will produce more overt political conflict, but it does this only as a reflection of the increased opportunity for individual and group access to the government process.
Such conflict is clearly highly desirable. Federalism, he explains:. It is nonsense to think that problems would disappear if Australia became a unitary state and there would be few who would argue that the politics of bureaucratic intrigue are preferable to the open cut and thrust of competitive politics in the variety of forums provided by a federal structure.
The fifth advantage I want to put before you is that federalism is a protection of liberty. I mentioned earlier that a federal structure protects citizens from oppression or exploitation on the part of state governments, through the right of exit. But federalism is also a shield against arbitrary central government. The late Geoffrey Sawer of the Australian National University in Canberra was a very distinguished constitutional lawyer. Although he was definitely no friend of federalism, he did have to admit that federalism was, in itself, a protection of individual liberty.
Even in its rather battered condition, Australian federalism has proved its worth in this respect. For example, it was the premiers and other state political leaders who led the struggle against the political broadcasts ban.
In fact, the New South Wales government was a plaintiff in the successful High Court challenge to that legislation, and that decision, I would suggest, was the perhaps the greatest advance in Australian political liberty since federation. The sixth advantage is better supervision of government. Decentralised governments make better decisions than centralised ones, for a number of reasons. Lord Bryce said that in the United States the growth of polity had been aided by the fact that state governments were watched more closely by the people than Congress was.
In other words, the British system of colonial self-government, which we had here after —and, in various forms, a little earlier—was to grant the colonies complete self-government in relation to domestic issues, subject to certain exceptions.
That may seem obvious, because we accept that that's the way it happened in Australia and we think that's the only way it could happen. But you should contrast that with the French approach to colonial self-government, which was—and still is—to allow the residents of the colonies to elect members of the National Parliament in Paris, whereas the colonies themselves are governed simply as overseas departments of France itself.
So this idea of local self-government as promoting better supervision is one which has been implemented even by Britain itself. This closer supervision is a function of lower monitoring costs. There are fewer programs and employees at state levels, and the amounts of tax revenues are smaller. Citizens can exercise more effective control when everything is on a smaller scale. Rent-seeking is easier in large than in small governments, because it is harder for ordinary citizens to see who is preying on them.
In that case, you might say, well hold on—how do you account for the financial disasters in Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia during the late s? Here, it seems, the supervisory mechanism failed as a result of media behaviour. There was information about the looming disasters, but—largely because of the preferences of reporters and editors—it was never placed before the public. The greater ease of supervising state government is partly a function of the proposition that a physically large country is ungovernable unless you have a federal system.
The seventh advantage is stability. Stability is a cardinal virtue in government. Stable government enables individuals and groups to plan their activities with some confidence, and so makes innovation and lasting progress possible. Political stability is much valued by ordinary people, because they are the ones most likely to suffer from sudden shocks or changes in direction in the government of the country.
So in that sense a stable government is more democratic than an unstable one, other things being equal. Stability is obviously a very high priority with the Australian people, as you can see from the tendency of people to vote for different political parties in the two houses of parliament. This is a practice designed to reduce the de-stabilising potential of transient majorities in the lower house.
Professor Brian Galligan of Melbourne University supports this assessment, with his observation that the traditional literature on Australian politics has exaggerated the radical character of the national ethos, while at the same time overlooking the stabilising effect of the Constitution. Why is it more stable? The federal compact, Galligan says, deals in an ingenious way with the problem of the multiplicity of competing answers and the lack of obvious solutions, by setting government institutions against one another, by breaking up national majorities and pitting institutions against one another.
This means that, in a federation, sweeping reforms are more difficult. But, at the same time, it also means that sweeping reforms are less likely to be needed. Successive Australian federal governments have encountered more frustrations in their efforts to restructure the economy than their counterparts in Britain or New Zealand. Opinion polls in those two countries show that most people consider the reforms made by the Thatcher and Lange governments to have been beneficial, but the process was a stressful one, and a destabilising one.
In New Zealand it led to public pressures that resulted in substantial changes, not necessarily for the better, in the whole system of parliamentary representation. Besides acting as a brake on extreme or impetuous federal government activity, federalism cushions the nation as a whole from the full impact of government errors or other reverses.
Lord Bryce likened a federal nation to a ship built with watertight compartments. He says:. The redundancies within federations provide fail-safe mechanisms and safety valves enabling one subsystem within a federation to respond to needs when another fails to.
In this sense, the very inefficiencies about which there are complaints may be the source of a longer-run basic effectiveness. For the same reason, damage control can bring results more quickly when the impact or a mistake or misfortune can be localised in this way. We've seen how the three affected states I mentioned have come through their tribulations, and in the process, interestingly, have adopted solutions from other Australian states to the problems which they have encountered.
When it comes to repairing the damage done by a policy area at the Commonwealth level, where the Commonwealth has a monopoly—such as monetary policy—then the process takes much longer.
We had in the s and s in this country unprecedented inflation, on a scale unknown in history. It began with Frank Crean's budget of , which has only recently been brought under control almost a generation later.
One shouldn't assume that a healthy economy requires or is even assisted by comprehensive central control. Some commentators such as P. McGuinness, Alan Wood and others maintain that it is quite practicable to devolve tax and fiscal policy powers to the states because, under a unified currency, it is not possible for one state to conduct an inflationary fiscal policy by running budget deficits very long.
The ninth advantage is the benefit of competition on efficiency in governments. Like all other human institutions, governments, if you give them the chance, will tend to behave like monopolists. A government that can restrict comparisons and prevent people from voting with their feet is in the position of a classic single-firm monopolist, and it can be as inefficient and oppressive as it likes. The paradigm case, of course, is the former Soviet Union. Inefficiency in government usually takes either of two forms, sometimes both.
This model is based on the proposition that government agents meaning elected representatives and public servants act in the same way as other people, that is from motives of rational self-interest. Consequently, they have a built-in incentive to administer programs in such a way as to minimise the proportion of the program's budget that is actually received by the intended beneficiaries, while the remainder, the surplus, is used to further the interests of the administrators.
A government that enjoys monopoly power—such as monopoly power over income tax, which ours has, in effect—is able to generate a surplus for discretionary use in this way. In the days when our universities were administered by the states, they were far from perfect, but they were very efficient, lean bodies, with the flattened management profile that is so much admired today.
A dean's administrative duties seldom took up so much as one day per week, and even the vice-chancellor was usually a part-time official, who also did teaching and research. Commonwealth involvement consisted of capital grants and funding Commonwealth scholarships, which could be obtained by any student who did better than average at the final school examination, with the result that fully 70 per cent of students completed their tertiary education paying no fees at all.
The transformation began in when the Commonwealth assumed financial control of the universities, and this gave universities access to the Commonwealth monopoly over income taxation. This surplus was increasingly used to expand the bureaucracy both in the universities and the government itself. Finally, the Dawkins revolution converted higher education into a complete centralised command economy, just when the rest of the world was abandoning that model.
This created hugely increased paperwork demands and generated whole new layers of career bureaucracy in the universities. At the university with which I am most familiar the ratio of teaching academics to administrative staff sank to 0. In other words, there were substantially more full-time bureaucrats than teaching staff, and that was not counting full-time deans and heads of departments and so on.
This is a very disturbing fact and a few of us tried to bring it up for debate in the university system, but without success.
So you have this enormous growth in non-academic activity. Academic salaries in real terms are a little over one-third of the level they were at in the s, [43] even though tenure has been all but abolished. And when the university budget has to be cut, it is invariably the teaching academics, not the administrators, who bear the weight of the retrenchments.
On top of that, the universities' secondary function, research, has been totally centralised in the Australian Research Council system and utterly politicised. At least, that was the situation when I left academic life in late Research in Australia and abroad shows that competitive federalism creates a competitive market for public goods, and provides consumer taxpayers with their preferred mix of public goods at the lowest tax price.
These gains in efficiency are not affected by the smaller size of state governments, because it appears that there are actually very few economies of scale in government, except in the areas of defence and foreign relations.
As Gordon Tullock, the Nobel laureate who has written on this subject points out, this is not surprising because large organisations generally are not significantly better at dealing with complex problems than smaller ones.
He points out that the Cray computer is the world's most complex computer, but the Cray company is not a very big computer company. Further, he points out, many of the functions carried out by national governments are not actually complex at all—notably the distribution of health and social welfare payments which is the largest single proportion of their work. Belgium, Switzerland and Nepal are such countries. As a response to these challenges of size and diversity, federalism can take various forms.
And, since no single country is exactly like another, no federal system is exactly alike either. Nevertheless, federalism does have some distinct, defining characteristics which make it different from other forms of decentralisation. The first characteristic is that federal systems have at least two levels of government.
There is a central level of government also sometimes known as the federal or union level which governs the entire country in relation to issues of importance to everyone. This usually means matters like defence, the armed forces, foreign policy, trade, citizenship, macro-economic policy, and national infrastructure like ports and airports.
The second level of government operates in the states, regions, provinces, or other entities into which the country is divided. Each of these has control over certain types of policy and legislation, usually of immediate relevance to its own people.
These are of course just typical examples. The level of decentralisation and the exact distribution of powers and responsibilities varies greatly between federations depending on their needs and circumstances. For example, in Nigeria, environmental protection is a state matter, but in Malaysia, it is run along federal lines.
In some federal systems there are powers which do not belong exclusively to either level of government but are shared between them. In India, for example, both the Indian Parliament and the State Legislatures can pass laws on criminal justice and social and economic planning.
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