The Outdated Logic of Federalism

When, in the 1770s and 1780s, the Founding Fathers set out to create a government for the colonies that were declaring their independence from the British empire, they faced what they thought was a big problem: the new nation was too big. They were committed to representative, republican government, see, and it was received wisdom that democratic forms of government just didn't work except in very small settings. A city-state like Athens? Fine. But a country sprawling over hundreds of thousands of square miles, most of them rural? It had never been done, and they assumed it couldn't be done. The logistics of governing so much territory, and of trying to have engagement and feedback by the citizenry on a regular basis, would just be too difficult. Thus, federalism, which maintains the smaller state governments as the primary--and independent--bases of day-to-day governing. Because the states were closer to the people, literally, they would be more responsive to those people, and everything would be great.



There's a poll out today that looks like it confirms the wisdom of this arrangement. It asked whether people had favorable or unfavorable opinions of the federal government, their state government, and their local government. The relationship between level of government and popularity was strong, and inverse. The federal government clocks in at -29% (33/62), while state governments have a +10% rating (52/42) and local governments have a fantastic +30 mark (61/31). It looks like the more local governments are doing a better job matching their constituents' desires. But wait! Over the lifespan of this poll, the federal government's rating has ranged from today's -29% to a +67% in late 2001. State governments have gone from a low of +6% in 2009 to a high of +59% in 2001. And the range for local governments runs from +28% to +61%. In other words, there's much less variance for the more local levels. (I should admit that this is a slightly singular sample, as it includes the aftermath of 9/11, after which there has been fairly little variance in the favorability ratings of any government level. I wish we had this data going back, say, several decades.)

But this pattern, of highly variable opinion of the national government but more uniformly positive opinion of local governments, is exactly what we should expect of a different theory about the relationships of governments to their people is right. Because the way democratic governments behave responsively to public sentiment is that, when they act in ways the electorate does not like, they become unpopular, and are then kicked out of office. In a properly democratic and accountable system, therefore, we should expect to find periods of high government popularity, when the public approves of what's being done, coupled with periods of low popularity, when the public does not approve of what's being done. That's what we see in the data regarding the federal government. It is perhaps useful to supplement this poll with Gallup's Congressional approval rating data, which has shown several spikes in the past few years clearly unrelated to September 11th.

Consistently high popularity suggests something else: lack of scrutiny. We see this effect with individual politicians: Hillary Clinton, for instance, saw a massive spike in her favorability numbers as soon as she stopped being an active candidate for the Presidency in 2008. Bill Clinton, George Bush, everyone benefits from moving out of the spotlight. And the spotlight on state governments, let alone local ones, is much, much dimmer than that trained on the federal government. I would guess that around 99%, perhaps more, of the people answering this question about the federal government could name its chief executive. A solid majority could probably name at least one member of its highest court, and several members of its legislature. The corresponding numbers for state and local government are undoubtedly much lower. So if you don't know who's running your local governments, and you presumably don't know what those governments have been doing either, then your opinion of those governments will be based largely on feelings of something analogous to patriotism: you like your state government because it is yours.

So the tremendous popularity of state and local governments vis-a-vis the national government is not actually an argument for the inherent superiority of (physically) smaller governments. It's a symptom of the scrutiny deficit in such smaller governments in the information age. And it is, therefore, a sign of why the justifications for insisting upon the quasi-sovereignty of America's local governments are becoming outdated and obsolete.