Critical Analyze: Federal-State Relations
American federalism has never been just a collection of congealed rights and laws that set forth in the US Constitution. That is why it could be stated that federal state relations is a dynamic multivariate process in which can be seen not only constitutional aspects, but also economic, administrative and political ones. This applies especially to the modern period of the US federalism history which made its consideration even more relevant in modern conditions.
This paper considers five research questions, which should be considered to better understand the current situation of the federal state relations and to be able to make future forecasts.
First of all: How does the problem of unfunded mandates limit the activity of the federal government?
Secondly: How big is impact of federal laws in the US and what fall under the jurisdiction of the federal government?
Thirdly: How does federal funding affect the municipal government?
Forth: How public administration reforms have affected the municipal governments?
Fifth: Why extent state governments are able to interact with each other?
The literature describes three generic models of federalism - double, cooperative and coercive. Conception of dual federalism is based on the fact that two levels of the federation, federal and regional, have their own sources of legitimacy and authority and each governmental level has considerable autonomy in their area of jurisdiction (Kincaid, 139). It should be noted that conception of dual federalism gradually began to be replaced by cooperative federalism in USA. Conception of cooperative federalism is focused on cooperation, interaction and interdependence of federal and its subjects (Kincaid, 139).
Basically, in the history of the United States allocated only this two types of federalism, however, some modern scholars tend to describe present federalism in US as ““coercive” because major political, fiscal, statutory, regulatory, and judicial practices entail impositions of many federal (i.e., national government) dictates on state and local governments” (Kincaid, 139). In fact, it should be mentioned that federation could not be perceived as fixed institutional form, especially in the case of US, it is rather adaptive, flexible and capable to react quickly on the internal and external problems. That is why it is impossible to talk about ideal types of federalism. The only option where three types of federalism can be applied are historical consideration of the federation, where dual federalism related to 19 century, cooperative federalism to the middle of 20 century and coercive federalism to the end of the 20 century. First of all, it should be mentioned that unfinanced mandates is unjust measure against individual states, which also cause dissatisfaction of the municipal authorities, since the federal budget is not even big enough to solve the problems of the federal Congress by using constitutional right to regulate commerce between states took a number of mandatory state regulations.
They are called ‘unfunded mandates’ as they demand certain actions …
