Martha derthick how many communities summary

The U. Rehnquist, has mounted an explicit and controversial defense of federalism, and new nominees to the Court are likely to be questioned on that subject and appraised in part by their responses. Derthick's essays invite readers to join the Court in weighing the contemporary importance of federalism as an institution of government.

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Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Institutional Login. LOG IN. In this Book. Additional Information. Table of Contents. But not always. Through much of its history federalism in the United States did not ease sectional tensions. On the contrary, at times the institution looked more like a springboard for secessionism. A long sequence of compromises with the sovereign Southern states, from the era of the founding through the first half of the 19 th century, failed to prevent the Civil War.

Public goods. A glaring defect of the Articles of Confederation had been the inability of the original thirteen former colonies to provide adequately for the common defense, the quintessential case of an essential and expensive public good. Perhaps less widely recalled is that more or less the same deficiency persisted into the 19 th century, well after the Constitution with its stronger union had been ratified.

The United States was still relying substantially on state militias to wage the War of , for instance.

Some of the militias were effective, others proved incompetent, and still others were unwilling to engage at all. The result came close to being fatal. Securing rights and other essentials. Were Martha Derthick still with us to peek at this paper she undoubtedly would be quick to agree that as with collective goods whether the example is provision of the national defense or construction of a coordinated network of highways so with upholding civil rights, ensuring a sound social safety net, and regulating health hazards that cross state lines: a mere state-by-state approach would too often fall short.

Historically, because defaulting to it could beget local abuses, inertia and freeloading, a strictly state-based agenda would eventually give way to a logical corrective: less federalism. By a national Civil Rights Act ultimately had to be summoned to meet the resistance of states in the South which were enforcing racial apartheid far into the 20th century. The New Deal was invoked in large part because most states had been unable to rescue their impoverished inhabitants from the Great Depression.

Unless otherwise encouraged, a community whose contaminated air or water flows downstream to other places has little incentive to stop the cross-border spillover for their sake. Derthick would be the first to recognize that such shortcomings of local control stem not infrequently from a basic difficulty Madison had identified in Federalist 10 : a propensity of small polities to be captured by entrenched interests.

Prior to, say, , were recalcitrant state governors and legislatures, left to themselves, prepared spontaneously to desegregate schools? Even now, can individual states and localities, which must compete for investment hence keep progressive tax rates in check and avoid degenerating to welfare magnets, be especially eager to redistribute wealth to needy households?

The remedy, of course, has been for the central government to add inducements and regulations aimed at overcoming the local derelictions. The extent of these requirements and restraints, often remarkably intricate, is worth contemplating. Consider the following brief sample of mundane local concerns affected by national legislation, regulations, or court cases.

As is well-known, federal lawsuits have reached deep into local employment practices and modes of personnel management.

Less visibly, federal law touches other routine matters. How many local taxpayers realize, for example, that it can have a bearing on what they have to pay for everything from snow removal to contracts to construct federally-mandated sidewalk ramps? What protective measures must be taken to secure local landfills, school buildings that may contain asbestos, and proper removal of lead paint from housing units, are no longer outside the orbit of federal prescriptions. Neither in quite a few places are the requisite procedures for, say, deploying firefighters at a burning building.

So much comingling of central tutelage with local affairs is not always easy to understand. A thorough explanation of why lines between national and local purviews became blurred would take us far afield.

For present purposes suffice it to say that Professor Derthick was among the leading political scientists who shed light on the question. Whatever else federated governance is supposed to do, it is meant to maintain some semblance of a division of labor between levels of government. To be sure, every federation struggles to delineate a viable demarcation of tasks.

For decades the European Union has tried to define subsidiarity, aspiring to arrange respective competences sensibly, but it continues to show uneven results. At first the court strained to defend state sovereignty, even opining rigidly that Congress could not regulate the products of child labor. This transformation has had a variety of consequences, including some confusing ones. I will come to a few of them in a later section of this article.

For all its altered attributes federalism in America retains vital advantages, not the least of which is what public finance economists call the concept of fiscal equivalence. True, grants and transfers from Washington account for a large share of resources available to states and cities.

This arrangement furthers fiscal responsibility and local creativity. If a state or municipality desires better schools, roads, or social services, its residents to a significant extent—not some distant patron—have to pay the piper.

To defray its expenses the municipality or state has to compete to attract taxpaying households and businesses. The interjurisdictional competition for jobs and wealth is often efficient. The resulting local experimentation may eventually redound to the benefit of society as a whole. All this, not just in theory but in fact, is the good news. Our federated republic has encouraged a modicum of fiscal discipline.

It has had a hand in restraining, albeit unevenly, the growth of a bloated public sector that overtaxes and overregulates. For commercial entrepreneurs the hurdles of starting a business in this country, and then of negotiating the labor market, are less intimidating than in a number of European countries.

For all the excesses of some spendthrift state governments none has recently suffered a fiscal crisis comparable to, for example, those of various distressed EU member states. Alas, however, the bad news is that the system also has the defect of its virtues.

The economic crash that arrived in served as a painful reminder that a primary obligation of any modern government is to take anti-recessionary action, and to do so expeditiously, comprehensively, and efficiently.

For therein, what may be virtuous constraints in normal times—chiefly the norms of fiscal equivalence and of balanced-budget requirements in nearly every state—can turn out to be liabilities in a severe economic slump.

Because they impel pro -cyclical policies that may partly neutralize the countercyclical efforts of the central government. So while Congress may deliver a fiscal stimulus, and the Federal Reserve pursues monetary expansion, states and localities have a tendency to move in the opposite direction: scrambling to meet revenue shortfalls, they cut budgets and raise taxes.

Not in my backyard. Many states simply declined to form their own health insurance exchanges, and many turned down the carrots that were offered to expand Medicaid enrollments. But secondly, and no less important, typically too little tends to be known about effective targeting. With the country in the throes of the worst recession since the Depression, Congress enacted a massive economic stimulus package early in They suspected that the legislature would be unable to stand up to the unchecked power of the Supreme Court, and they feared that the populist presidency would grow in power until it overwhelmed popular rule and sober self-government.

Such concerns have risen to high collective consciousness many times in American history. Several contemporary observers of the American political scene have predicted that, if the United States government were ever to fall, a despotic presidency would be to blame. Derthick did not frame her criticism of American politics in such apocalyptic terms, but she did worry that the rise of a populist presidency could obscure how policy is actually made and put too great a distance between citizens and the policy process.

A populist American President appears on television and video daily as a sponsor of grandiose policy proposals: free community college education; a mission to Mars. The populist-style President himself is a product of the cauldron of election contests that demand ambitious proposals but offer hazy details on implementation or any reasonable metric as to how such proposals might be evaluated. This sort of President nowadays invariably gets absorbed into an electronic celebrity culture saturated by advertising language.

Meanwhile, laws emerge behind the scenes from issue networks rather than the minds of lawmakers. The presidentialization of everything has spread beyond health, welfare, and education to other domains, including disaster management. Today, the President is the responder-in-chief to any major disaster, from floods to hurricanes to oil spills.

In emergency management, as in the tobacco settlement, politicians sometimes derive benefits from a social ill. Disaster losses offer politicians an opportunity to come to the rescue. It is too perverse to say that politicians hope for disaster losses, but they do have more incentives to respond ably than to take steps to prevent disaster losses in the first place by, for example, limiting development in flood plains and other risky locations.

Questions about how to manage sustainable development, however, depend on context and buy-in rather than on rational planning.

Making the presidency the locus of policymaking in areas previously reserved for the states, such as education or welfare, risks closing off avenues for participation and for creative implementation in different regions. Critics of the contemporary Anti-Federalist approach might point out that state legislatures, elected judges, and city councils are even more likely to be captured by special interests than Presidents.

The best way to defeat narrow, particularistic interests is to reinvigorate participatory processes, electoral contests, and opportunities for interaction with the bureaucracy that implements laws and policy. She explains in that book why the time was ripe for a consensus among economists to lead to deregulation of the trucking, banking, and airline industries in the late s.

Though often associated with conservatives, deregulation proceeded apace during the presidency of Jimmy Carter. She showed how ideas can persuade bureaucrats to join coalitions for reform. Here, as in other cases, she was at pains to demonstrate how settled truths about political behavior are often not true at all. She recognized the advantages of nationhood but observed that democracy is best practiced when power is local, transparent, and, as much as is possible, open to all.

Nevertheless, she understood well the dark side of political subsidiarity. When a system of decentralized power was seen to produce flagrant violations of fairness now literally seen on national television , the system itself was discredited.

She completed her Ph. Key, a scholar of American elections at Harvard, but Edward Banfield employed her to assist in compiling reports on the politics of cities.

This view is now conventional wisdom, thanks in no small part to the pioneering anti-social engineering work of The Public Interest , which twice hosted Derthick essays. Perhaps this perspective on university life is what helped Derthick decide to spend much of her career at the Brookings Institution, where she served as director of its Governance Studies Program from to She ultimately returned to university life as a chaired professor at the University of Virginia and continued to write articles and books and take an interest in students even after her formal retirement in Derthick described herself as a journalist by temperament and method, a disposition perhaps inherited from her father, who was a reporter and editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

She had a deep respect for the facts, an early instinct she never lost. Her modesty, however, understates the depth of understanding found in her method. To begin with, she read everything, from scholarship to government reports. Then she spoke to people involved in whatever she was studying. She folded all that she learned into beautiful prose. She was not afraid to master the quotidian—what policymakers do and how they define their tasks—and not only the ideas that presumably motivate them.

Derthick was concerned with what mattered most: meaningful participation in government; citizenship in the fullest sense of the term; effective public services; and structuring government so that markets and regulation each have their place.

But she also knew, along with sociologist Peter Rossi, that the better the test, the closer the effects get to zero. While her intellectual identity formed during the social upheavals of the s, unlike many of her contemporaries she did not believe the solution to social problems lay in a unitary form of government, which she saw as a nod toward social authoritarianism.