What Is American Federalism and What Is It Good For?

• In Event: Federalism and Labor Politics

Abstract

The study of American federalism is experiencing a renaissance, with new approaches coming from comparative politics, political economy, and American political development. Some scholarship has reinforced traditional findings with renewed claims of state-level democratic decline, increased race and class inequality, and uneven policy enforcement, while others find that American-style federalism may help to constrain the current era of democratic backsliding. The 2020 election has drawn special scrutiny. One set of scholars sees American-style federalism as a bulwark against a potential Trump coup while others see it as having contributed to Trump’s rise to power (Landau et al 2020; Grumbach 2022; Kelemen et al forthcoming). Paradoxically, perhaps, American-style federalism is implicated in both the creation and the disruption of anti-democratic processes.

Yet it’s not clear that scholars are examining the same dimensions of American federalism or even have the same conceptual understanding of it. American-style federalism is unusual in many ways. Many more core functions of government—public safety, courts, elections—are allocated to state and local governments in the United States than in other advanced democracies, and this is a common way of understanding American federalism. But federalism is tied, directly or indirectly, to many other aspects of the U.S. political system that are also distinctive. Unlike other federal democracies, the constitution provides few specific guidelines for the division of constitutional responsibilities between national and regional governments, does not require formal equalization of fiscal resources across regions, creates a highly malapportioned upper chamber and a state-based method of electing the President, and, since the 17th Amendment, no formal representation of regional governments in the national legislature.

Contemporary debates often implicate “federalism” without any formal definition or any explanation of the specific elements that are included (or omitted) in the study. Moreover, few analyses incorporate the relationship between American federalism and other distinctive institutional features of the United States constitution. Without a clearer theoretical framework for understanding the nature of American federalism, our methodological approaches risk overlooking alternative causal stories, misstating causal mechanisms, or making inappropriate counter-factual assumptions.

This paper provides a framework for understanding and assessing the unique features of American federalism and their relationship to democratic processes and policies. Drawing on comparative politics, political economy, and American political development, I develop this framework in several ways. First, I disentangle analyses of the different demos-enhancing/constraining dimensions of American federalism from those focused on socio-economic policy implications (though these categories can overlap). Second, I consider the nature and effects of American federalism over time, with particular attention to how different interests intersect with specific dimensions of federalism. Levels of elite polarization, the relative strength of economic elites and racial partisans, the scope of democratization and retrenchment at both the state and national levels, as well as exogenous forces (e.g., globalization) have implications for different dimensions of American-style federalism and its impact on a wide range of outcomes. Periodization helps to illustrate federalism’s many moving parts, its dynamic nature, and its relation to other distinctive features of American politics (e.g., bicameralism, presidentialism and judicial supremacy).

The paper concludes with a modest research agenda on American-style federalism that offers more analytic clarity and allows for more precise comparisons of its effects over issues and across time.

Author

• Lisa L. Miller, Rutgers University, New Brunswick