Why does federalism encourage experimentation

The federal design of our Constitution and the system of checks and balances has jeopardized or outright blocked federal responses to important national issues. National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius , U. No longer are the nine states with histories of racial discrimination in their voting processes required to submit plans for changes to the federal government for approval.

The benefits of federalism are that it can encourage political participation, give states an incentive to engage in policy innovation, and accommodate diverse viewpoints across the country.

The disadvantages are that it can set off a race to the bottom among states, cause cross-state economic and social disparities, and obstruct federal efforts to address national problems.

Describe the primary differences in the role of citizens in government among the federal, confederation, and unitary systems. How have the political and economic relationships between the states and federal government evolved since the early s? What do you see as the upcoming challenges to federalism in the next decade?

Choose an issue and outline how the states and the federal government could respond. Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Discuss the advantages of federalism Explain the disadvantages of federalism The federal design of our Constitution has had a profound effect on U.

Liebmann , U. Nissinen; credit b: modification of work by Marcin Wichary Another advantage of federalism is that because our federal system creates two levels of government with the capacity to take action, failure to attain a desired policy goal at one level can be offset by successfully securing the support of elected representatives at another level.

Senate U. House of Representatives State Government 50 State legislatures 7, Statewide offices 1, State boards 1, Local Government County governments 3, 58, Municipal governments 19, , Town governments 16, , School districts 13, 95, Special districts 35, 84, Total 87, , If you are interested in serving the public as an elected official, there are more opportunities to do so at the local and state levels than at the national level.

Furthermore, health-care access, costs, and quality vary greatly across states. Shelby County v. Holder , U. Which of the following is not a benefit of federalism? Federalism promotes political participation. Federalism encourages economic equality across the country. Federalism provides for multiple levels of government action. Federalism accommodates a diversity of opinion. Describe the advantages of federalism. Federalism is a strategic compromise that divides powers and responsibilities between two main levels of government: a central or union level, and a state or regional level.

In a federal system, it is agreed that a central government manages issues of common concern. These are issues like economic policy, foreign policy and national defence. It also guarantees some level of autonomy to specific territorial units - which might be states, regions, or provinces. These territorial units usually have autonomy over identity issues, like language and culture, regional economic development, infrastructure and public services.

Federalism is a practical way of dealing with some - but not all - of the tough challenges and problems of coexistence that exist in diverse societies. What can it do for the people, but also what are its limitations? First, federalism can give people meaningful powers to choose policies that suit their specific needs in their own territories. This might be based on identity. For example, they can choose what language they are to be educated in and to have news broadcast in that language.

It might be control of local economic development - promoting local industries like agriculture, tourism and trade - or management of natural resources such as water, minerals and forests. It might also be because the country is very large. This makes it hard to govern the entire country from the capital city. For example, Australia has no major cultural differences between states, but it would be hard to govern such a large territory from one location.

Second, federalism disperses access to power, wealth and resources more widely to different territorial groups. It may help promote both peace and stability by giving local people a stake in the system.

It might also encourage better governance, with more equal economic development. Third, by satisfying demands for recognition, autonomy and resources, federalism might help ease political tensions and prevent secession.

It might help countries that would otherwise fall apart, to hold together. Take for example the question of de facto relationships. They have recently attracted the attention of lawmakers because they exist today on a scale that is unprecedented in our history. Well, the only way to know is to see what happens in practice and compare the results. Besides making this kind of experiment possible, a federal system makes it harder for governments to dismiss evidence that undermines their favoured approach, because the results of experience in one's own country are much harder to ignore than evidence from foreign lands.

And that's one reason why lobby groups and ideologues and activists of all stripes tend to be rather hostile to federalism. Hardly a week passes without some lobby group lamenting the different approaches taken by state laws to current social or economic issues, and calling for uniform national legislation to deal with the problem.

Well, behind these calls for uniformity, one can usually find a desire to impose one solution on the whole country, precisely so that evidence about the effectiveness of other approaches in Australian conditions will not become available, because unless experimentation can be suppressed, the lobbyists cannot isolate their theory from confrontation with conflicting evidence.

In any event, when you look more closely at a lot of proposals for uniform legislation, the uniformity itself turns out to be an illusion. An example is the Federal Evidence Act of , which was meant to be re-enacted by all the states. It does it by giving the trial judge a complete discretion as to whether to admit the evidence or not. Justice Einstein of the New South Wales Court of Appeal says that the exercise of these discretions is not normally reviewable on appeal.

In other words, what the trial judge says, goes. So what you get is a substantial extension of the powers of individual trial judges in this fundamental question of admissibility, which often decides the outcome of a case. So instead of six different state laws and two territory laws capable of affecting the outcome of a case, we now in effect have as many different evidence laws as we have trial judges. Of course, neither uniformity nor diversity is an advantage in itself.

Sometimes the gains from nationwide uniformity will clearly outweigh the benefits of independent experimentation. That will usually be the case where there is long experience to draw on, for example in defence arrangements, the official language, railway gauges, currency, bills of exchange, weights and measures, and that sort of thing.

But experimentation has special advantages in dealing with new problems presented in a rapidly changing society, or in developing new solutions when the old ones are no longer working. The third advantage is the accommodation of regional preferences and diversity. A federal constitution gives a country the flexibility to accommodate variations in economic bases, social tastes and attitudes.

These characteristics correlate substantially with geography, and state laws in a federation can be adapted to local conditions in a way that is rather hard to do in a national unitary system. This enables government to become more in harmony with the people's wishes. In addition, this outlet for minority or local views has the effect of strengthening overall national unity.

When Wayne Goss was premier of Queensland he was making this point when he warned that abolishing the states, even de facto, could tear the country apart. Even in Australia there are cultural and attitudinal differences between the states.

If you doubt that, just look at the way in which the national media characterise Queenslanders or Western Australians, or the condescension you sometimes see in their references to Tasmanians.

Some critics of federalism might acknowledge these differences, but they say that really the only possible justification for a federal system is social or cultural differences, and in Australia they are not marked enough to justify it, and that the state borders are purely arbitrary lines lacking a real social basis. Professor Sharman says that those propositions are unfounded, and he gives these reasons:.

To begin with, a sense of political community can exist quite independently of social differences between communities. Geographical contiguity, social interaction and a sharing of common problems all tend to create a feeling of community, whether it is a street, a neighbourhood or a state. The chestnut about the arbitrary nature of state boundaries is not only wrong as a geographical observation for many state borders—deserts, Bass Strait and the Murray River are hardly arbitrary lines—but fundamentally misconceives the nature and consequences of boundaries.

Drawing political borders on a featureless plain is an arbitrary act, but once drawn, those lines rapidly acquire social reality. To his list of natural boundaries in Australia, one could add the Queensland border ranges, which mark off the eastern tropical and sub-tropical regions. Also, one could point to the simple factor of the huge distances between the main urban settled areas in Australia, which is probably more marked here than in any other country. Despite the wonders of modern communication, if people are really going to empathise and understand one another they still need to get together and talk face to face.

The argument that Australia is too uniform, too homogeneous, to be a federation also runs into the problem that federalism quite clearly works best when differences between states are not too marked and not too geographically delineated. Multi-ethnic federations are definitely the hardest ones to sustain.

For example, there is no state, or group of states, that is overwhelmingly black, or American Indian, or Jewish, or Catholic, or Asian or what have you. Then you contrast that with Canada, where most of the French-speaking population is concentrated in Quebec, which itself is overwhelmingly French-speaking, and the results are obvious.

Similar tensions caused Singapore, which is overwhelmingly Chinese, to secede from the Malaysian federation. So in that light, Australia's relative uniformity from a social and cultural point of view is an argument for, and not against, a federal structure.

The fourth advantage is the greater ability to participate in government and the potential for countering elitism. A federation is inherently more democratic than a unitary system, simply because there are more levels of government for popular opinion to affect. Otherwise the result would be elite rule by a single city, such as London or Paris.

This characteristic of decentralised government makes people in a federation more like active participants than passive recipients. It produces men and women who are citizens, rather than subjects, and gives governments a greater degree of legitimacy.

This more democratic aspect of federalism is especially important at a time when elitist theories of government, although dressed up in democratic garb, are once again in vogue.

The struggle between government by the people and government by an elite is as a struggle as old as the western political tradition itself. In fact, political science was founded on that dichotomy, on that struggle, because Plato's The Republic was largely his criticism of democracy as it operated at Athens. In its latest manifestation, the conflict between elitism and democracy has been said to explain modern politics more satisfactorily than the traditional division between left and right.

Elitism has of course been dominant through most of history. The democracy that we know is only two centuries old, a product of the French and American revolutions. 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.