Purchase Solution

Federalism & Public Policy Making

Not what you're looking for?

Ask Custom Question

How does federalism in the U.S. affect policy development?

How then does policy development affect the rights of the individual?

What is the overall effect? Should we be concerned?

Provide two examples to support argument.

Purchase this Solution

Solution Summary

This essay explores how federalism affects policymaking, national and state governments in terms of social planners actions that spill over from one region to another. Most recently comparative welfare state research has acknowledged the importance of state structures in explaining cross-natural variation in both the level and dynamics of social policy formation.

Solution Preview

According to Wallack & Srinivasan (2010) on the one end of the spectrum concerning how federalism affects policymaking, national and subnational (e.g. state governments) are assumed to act as benevolent social planners who are omniscient and omnipotent, with national planners capable of addressing any externalities from subnational social planners' actions that spill over from one region to another; social planners at all levels are assumed to have all the relevant information and capacity for enforcement of their decisions, and opportunistic behavior is assumed to be nonexistent; and on the other hand, according to these authors, political economic analyses incorporate policymakers with diverse abilities and less than public-minded innovations, economic settings that include both international and domestic factors, and other historical social details; this part of the literature also considers various constraints on the central or federal government's ability to carry out policies. According to this site, a smaller subset of the analyses of federalism delves into the dynamics of federalism, analyzing the politics of assigning responsibilities to various levels of government and the factors behind evolving federal structures; the constantly changing de jure and de facto arrangements for federal versus state government interaction present perhaps the most complex challenge for analyzing federalism.
(Perhaps we must remember that politicians are not perfect and are only human beings as well).

In essence federalism is a set of institutional arrangements between the federal and state governments in which the ideas and interests of both of these vary in terms of allocating policy responsbilities between different levels of government (executive, legislative and judicial branches of government). Sorry for all of the confusion.

According to Obinger, Castles & Leibfried ((1999) recent comparative welfare state research has acknowledged the importance of ...

Purchase this Solution


Free BrainMass Quizzes
Canadian Politics

A brief look into various aspects of Canadian Politics.