Using survey data collected from residents of counties along the South Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States, we use innovative compositional data analysis techniques to examine individuals’ assignment of responsibility for hurricane preparedness across federal, state, and local officials as well as among household residents and their community. We find that the public assigns limited responsibility for hurricane preparedness to governments. Rather, respondents, especially conservatives and those with low trust in government, view individuals themselves as responsible for preparedness. Our results emphasize the role of ideology and the individualistic culture of American politics. These results also have implications for scholars who study individual attribution responsibility in multi-level systems and who may assume that individuals will assign responsibility to one of the various levels of government; however, focusing on disaster preparation in particular, our study shows that a significant number of individuals may not assign responsibility to government at any level.
{"title":"Public Attribution of Responsibility for Disaster Preparedness across Three Levels of Government and the Public: Lessons from a Survey of Residents of the U.S. South Atlantic and Gulf Coast","authors":"Wesley Wehde, M. Nowlin","doi":"10.1093/publius/pjaa037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjaa037","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Using survey data collected from residents of counties along the South Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States, we use innovative compositional data analysis techniques to examine individuals’ assignment of responsibility for hurricane preparedness across federal, state, and local officials as well as among household residents and their community. We find that the public assigns limited responsibility for hurricane preparedness to governments. Rather, respondents, especially conservatives and those with low trust in government, view individuals themselves as responsible for preparedness. Our results emphasize the role of ideology and the individualistic culture of American politics. These results also have implications for scholars who study individual attribution responsibility in multi-level systems and who may assume that individuals will assign responsibility to one of the various levels of government; however, focusing on disaster preparation in particular, our study shows that a significant number of individuals may not assign responsibility to government at any level.","PeriodicalId":47224,"journal":{"name":"Publius-The Journal of Federalism","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91103865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Intergovernmental Transfers in Federations, edited by Serdar Yilmaz and Farah Zahir","authors":"Andreas Pehr","doi":"10.1093/publius/pjaa034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjaa034","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47224,"journal":{"name":"Publius-The Journal of Federalism","volume":"7 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"84177348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Chanchal Kumar Sharma, S. Destradi, Johannes Plagemann
This article situates the international activities of subnational governments in India within the broader political economy of federalism. It argues that the nature and the extent of subnational states’ engagements in international affairs are a function of the partisan political relationship the state incumbents have with the national incumbents. The article takes a mixed methods approach. An analysis of 1,153 episodes of international engagements of India’s states from 1996 to 2017 reveals that shifts in foreign policy engagement of selected state governments primarily reflect alterations in the subnational incumbents’ political affiliation with the Union government. Several qualitative case studies shed light on how the central government’s inclusion of subnational governments’ perspectives and representatives in foreign affairs is highly partisan and profoundly political. Therefore, the Indian case reveals how subnational diplomatic interactions merge domestic and international politics.
{"title":"Partisan Federalism and Subnational Governments’ International Engagements: Insights from India","authors":"Chanchal Kumar Sharma, S. Destradi, Johannes Plagemann","doi":"10.1093/publius/pjaa017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjaa017","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article situates the international activities of subnational governments in India within the broader political economy of federalism. It argues that the nature and the extent of subnational states’ engagements in international affairs are a function of the partisan political relationship the state incumbents have with the national incumbents. The article takes a mixed methods approach. An analysis of 1,153 episodes of international engagements of India’s states from 1996 to 2017 reveals that shifts in foreign policy engagement of selected state governments primarily reflect alterations in the subnational incumbents’ political affiliation with the Union government. Several qualitative case studies shed light on how the central government’s inclusion of subnational governments’ perspectives and representatives in foreign affairs is highly partisan and profoundly political. Therefore, the Indian case reveals how subnational diplomatic interactions merge domestic and international politics.","PeriodicalId":47224,"journal":{"name":"Publius-The Journal of Federalism","volume":"3 1","pages":"566-592"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79044913","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
An important problem with decentralized government relates to its tendency to create disparities between the various units with respect to their capability to provide public goods. In response to this problem, intergovernmental equalization grant transfers are a ubiquitous feature of many systems of decentralized government. However, since the earliest times, scholars of fiscal federalism have struggled to provide a convincing moral justification for providing intergovernmental equalization grants. We outline how the principle of subsidiarity might be employed to create a robust moral justification for providing equalization transfers. In addition, we explicate the steps required to operationalize a subsidiarity-based grant system and conclude with a consideration of some of the difficulties that might be encountered in doing so.
{"title":"Subsidiarity and the Moral Justification of Intergovernmental Equalization Grants to Decentralized Governments","authors":"J. Drew, M. Miyazaki","doi":"10.1093/publius/pjaa018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjaa018","url":null,"abstract":"An important problem with decentralized government relates to its tendency to create disparities between the various units with respect to their capability to provide public goods. In response to this problem, intergovernmental equalization grant transfers are a ubiquitous feature of many systems of decentralized government. However, since the earliest times, scholars of fiscal federalism have struggled to provide a convincing moral justification for providing intergovernmental equalization grants. We outline how the principle of subsidiarity might be employed to create a robust moral justification for providing equalization transfers. In addition, we explicate the steps required to operationalize a subsidiarity-based grant system and conclude with a consideration of some of the difficulties that might be encountered in doing so.","PeriodicalId":47224,"journal":{"name":"Publius-The Journal of Federalism","volume":"43 1","pages":"698-709"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85073162","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Why do common-pool problems persist over time in federations? The literature shows that macro institutional, economic, and political incentives facilitate bailouts through intergovernmental transfers and debt management. Little research, however, explores the legislative mechanisms that prevent common-pool problems from being effectively addressed. This article focuses on a most central mechanism: tax lawmaking. We argue that lawmakers, whose careers rest in the hands of provincial constituencies, administer the legislative process to promote bills that protect the federal transfers that finance vertical fiscal imbalances and to amend proposals that seek to change them. Using an expert-coded dataset designed to assess the direction and magnitude of tax policy change, as described by the amendments proposed by legislators to the full set of tax bills proposed to the Argentine Congress since 1983, we document the legislative dynamics underpinning the common-pool problems of decentralized fiscal federal arrangements.
{"title":"Legislating Fiscal Imbalance: Using Tax Policy to Protect Fiscal Decentralization in the Argentine Congress","authors":"A. Bonvecchi, Ernesto Calvo, Ernesto H. Stein","doi":"10.1093/publius/pjaa001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjaa001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Why do common-pool problems persist over time in federations? The literature shows that macro institutional, economic, and political incentives facilitate bailouts through intergovernmental transfers and debt management. Little research, however, explores the legislative mechanisms that prevent common-pool problems from being effectively addressed. This article focuses on a most central mechanism: tax lawmaking. We argue that lawmakers, whose careers rest in the hands of provincial constituencies, administer the legislative process to promote bills that protect the federal transfers that finance vertical fiscal imbalances and to amend proposals that seek to change them. Using an expert-coded dataset designed to assess the direction and magnitude of tax policy change, as described by the amendments proposed by legislators to the full set of tax bills proposed to the Argentine Congress since 1983, we document the legislative dynamics underpinning the common-pool problems of decentralized fiscal federal arrangements.","PeriodicalId":47224,"journal":{"name":"Publius-The Journal of Federalism","volume":"40 1","pages":"620-644"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81556979","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A growing number of scholars have documented how social identities defined by an attachment to place influence individuals’ understandings about political power and representation. Drawing on this theoretical framework, we explore how place-based identities matter for American federalism by documenting how attachments to the American states alter individuals’ decisions to leave, or exit, as well as to welcome newcomers into their local communities. Using a set of conjoint experiments designed to measure individual attitudes about place, politics, and America’s federal polity, we find evidence that Americans hold deep and consequential attitudes about the places in which they live. Our evidence confirms that state identities are still highly relevant in shaping American federalism and the competitive pressures between intergovernmental jurisdictions. While federalism may encourage individuals to leave, federalism also nourishes place-specific attachments, motivating people to stay.
{"title":"Staying in Place: Federalism and the Political Economy of Place Attachment","authors":"N. Jacobs, B. Munis","doi":"10.1093/publius/pjaa024","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjaa024","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 A growing number of scholars have documented how social identities defined by an attachment to place influence individuals’ understandings about political power and representation. Drawing on this theoretical framework, we explore how place-based identities matter for American federalism by documenting how attachments to the American states alter individuals’ decisions to leave, or exit, as well as to welcome newcomers into their local communities. Using a set of conjoint experiments designed to measure individual attitudes about place, politics, and America’s federal polity, we find evidence that Americans hold deep and consequential attitudes about the places in which they live. Our evidence confirms that state identities are still highly relevant in shaping American federalism and the competitive pressures between intergovernmental jurisdictions. While federalism may encourage individuals to leave, federalism also nourishes place-specific attachments, motivating people to stay.","PeriodicalId":47224,"journal":{"name":"Publius-The Journal of Federalism","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/publius/pjaa024","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42007618","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nadim Farhat, Ward Vloeberghs, P. Bourbeau, P. Poirier
The theory of congruence in comparative federalism holds that institutional design will, eventually, reflect societal divisions by transferring central powers to new, autonomous entities. While this model helps to understand why many divided societies adopt federalism, it cannot explain why only certain unitary states transform into federal ones while others do not. We use a historical institutionalism approach to identify the critical junctures in the trajectory of two prominent plural polities, Belgium and Lebanon. We suggest that the politicization of identities during initial stages of state-building plays a major role in the transformation of a unitary state into a federation—which occurs in the former but not in the latter of our cases. The current contrast in both consociational democracies is explained here as a legacy of the late nineteenth century, which set in motion decisive logics of public governance that direct institutional dynamics until today.
{"title":"Transforming Unitary States into Federations: Path-Dependent Construction of Political Identities in Belgium and Lebanon","authors":"Nadim Farhat, Ward Vloeberghs, P. Bourbeau, P. Poirier","doi":"10.1093/publius/pjaa007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjaa007","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The theory of congruence in comparative federalism holds that institutional design will, eventually, reflect societal divisions by transferring central powers to new, autonomous entities. While this model helps to understand why many divided societies adopt federalism, it cannot explain why only certain unitary states transform into federal ones while others do not. We use a historical institutionalism approach to identify the critical junctures in the trajectory of two prominent plural polities, Belgium and Lebanon. We suggest that the politicization of identities during initial stages of state-building plays a major role in the transformation of a unitary state into a federation—which occurs in the former but not in the latter of our cases. The current contrast in both consociational democracies is explained here as a legacy of the late nineteenth century, which set in motion decisive logics of public governance that direct institutional dynamics until today.","PeriodicalId":47224,"journal":{"name":"Publius-The Journal of Federalism","volume":"1 1","pages":"593-619"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90701035","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Horizontal cooperation among political systems is crucial for addressing large-scale and boundary-crossing policy problems. This article introduces and analyzes policy-specific factors that help to explain horizontal cooperation among subnational-governments. It thereby builds on but specifies arguments from the literature on horizontal federalism that has usually been focusing on general institutional and societal factors to explain cooperation. These factors capture how a given policy problem unfolds (problem pressure), the ways in which subnational governments are exposed to and experience its consequences in similar or unequal ways (functional interdependencies and their symmetry), and how the issues are treated domestically (problem awareness). We illustrate the potential importance of these factors by analyzing treaties among Swiss substates in the water domain and relying on network analytic methods. We find that problem awareness and functional interdependencies and their (a)symmetries are important, whereas problem pressure has a mixed influence, depending on the issue area.
{"title":"How Policy-Specific Factors Influence Horizontal Cooperation among Subnational Governments: Evidence from the Swiss Water Sector","authors":"M. Fischer, Nicolas W. Jager","doi":"10.1093/publius/pjaa002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjaa002","url":null,"abstract":"Horizontal cooperation among political systems is crucial for addressing large-scale and boundary-crossing policy problems. This article introduces and analyzes policy-specific factors that help to explain horizontal cooperation among subnational-governments. It thereby builds on but specifies arguments from the literature on horizontal federalism that has usually been focusing on general institutional and societal factors to explain cooperation. These factors capture how a given policy problem unfolds (problem pressure), the ways in which subnational governments are exposed to and experience its consequences in similar or unequal ways (functional interdependencies and their symmetry), and how the issues are treated domestically (problem awareness). We illustrate the potential importance of these factors by analyzing treaties among Swiss substates in the water domain and relying on network analytic methods. We find that problem awareness and functional interdependencies and their (a)symmetries are important, whereas problem pressure has a mixed influence, depending on the issue area.","PeriodicalId":47224,"journal":{"name":"Publius-The Journal of Federalism","volume":"68 1","pages":"645-671"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"83130703","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Divided Unions: The Wagner Act, Federalism, and Organized Labor, by Alexis N. Walker","authors":"Daniel DiSalvo","doi":"10.1093/publius/pjaa029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjaa029","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47224,"journal":{"name":"Publius-The Journal of Federalism","volume":"30 4 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76487928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Publius: The Journal of Federalism from its Founding to Half-Century Mark","authors":"J. Kincaid","doi":"10.1093/publius/pjaa030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/publius/pjaa030","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47224,"journal":{"name":"Publius-The Journal of Federalism","volume":"81 1","pages":"541-543"},"PeriodicalIF":1.8,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91342859","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}