2. Federalism, American style

2019 ◽  
pp. 14-32
Author(s):  
Mark J. Rozell ◽  
Clyde Wilcox
Keyword(s):  
Social Factors ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Federal System ◽  
Central Control ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
The Us ◽  
American Style

“Federalism, American style” describes the end of the colonial period, the Articles of Confederation, and the drafting of the new Constitution. Federal systems are partially a function of history, geography, and political and social factors. The US federal system is more decentralized than those of most other countries, in part because thirteen separate colonies spent years resisting central control from Britain and fought a war of independence. They were not keen to give up power to a central government. The Constitution and the Bill of Rights set into motion the formal bases for the US federal system. Key provisions of the Constitution specifically address how federalism should operate.

6. Advantages and disadvantages of federalism

2019 ◽  
pp. 74-87
Author(s):  
Mark J. Rozell ◽  
Clyde Wilcox
Keyword(s):  
Central Government ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Federal System ◽  
Economic Problems ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Perfect System ◽  
The Us ◽  
Different Levels

Advantages and disadvantages of federalism as much as the federal system is the preferred option of Americans who historically have had a skeptical view of centralized power, it is far from a perfect system for the effective operations of government. Despite its many virtues, the shortcomings inherent in the US federal system lead many observers to question whether it is adequate to meet the needs of increasingly complex social and economic problems. Advantages include flexibility of standards and in dealing with religious diversity, experimentation, varying policies at different levels of government, keeping central government in check, and providing citizen choice. Disadvantages include competition between the states, inefficiency, inequality, and lack of accountability.

Suffering Spectators of Development

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arjun Chowdhury
Keyword(s):  
Civil Wars ◽  
Central Government ◽  
State Capacity ◽  
State Power ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Alternative View

This chapter offers an alternative view of the incidence and duration of insurgencies in the postcolonial world. Insurgencies and civil wars are seen as the primary symptom of state weakness, the inability of the central government to monopolize violence. Challenging extant explanations that identify poverty and low state capacity as the cause of insurgencies, the chapter shows that colonial insurgencies, also occurring in the context of poverty and state weakness, were shorter and ended in regime victories, while contemporary insurgencies are longer and states are less successful at subduing them. The reason for this is the development of exclusive identities—based on ethnicity, religion, tribe—in the colonial period. These identities serve as bases for mobilization to challenge state power and demand services from the state. Either way, such mobilization means that popular demands for services exceed the willingness to disarm and/or pay taxes, that is, to supply the state.

scholarly journals Voting Rights for Non-Citizens: The European Multilevel and the US Federal Constitutional Systems Compared

2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 392-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Fabbrini
Keyword(s):  
State Level ◽  
Voting Rights ◽  
The State ◽  
Comparative Perspective ◽  
Federal System ◽  
Future Prospects ◽  
The Us ◽  
Comparative Methodology ◽  
Federal Constitutional ◽  
Regulatory Models

Voting rights – Citizens and aliens – European multilevel architecture – US federal system – Comparative methodology – Different regulatory models for non-citizens suffrage at the state level in Europe – Impact of supranational law – Challenges and tensions – Analogous dynamics in the US constitutional experience – Recent European legal and jurisprudential developments in comparative perspective – What future prospects for citizenship and democracy in Europe?

The Future of the American States

1936 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Brooke Graves
Keyword(s):  
State Government ◽  
Central Government ◽  
University Of Pennsylvania ◽  
Federal System ◽  
State Governments ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
American States ◽  
The People ◽  
The Future ◽  
The University

In any consideration of the future of the states, it is desirable at the outset to recall the circumstances of their development and of their entry into the Union. When the present Constitution was framed and adopted, the states were more than a century and a half old. At that time, and for many years thereafter, it was the states to which the people gave their primary allegiance. Under the Articles of Confederation, the strength of the states was so great that the central government was unable to function; when the Constitution was framed, the people were still greatly concerned about “states' rights.” This priority of the states in the federal system continued through the nineteenth century, down to the period of the Civil War; in the closing decades of that century, state government sank into the depths in an orgy of graft and corruption and inefficiency, which resulted in a wave of state constitutional restrictions, particularly upon legislative powers.At this time, when the prestige and efficiency of the state governments were at their lowest ebb, there began to appear ringing indictments of the whole state system. Most conspicuous of these were the well known writings of Professors John W. Burgess, of Columbia University, and Simon N. Patten, of the University of Pennsylvania.

Legal basis of «democracy»

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sergey Polischuk
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Bill Of Rights ◽  
Legal Basis ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Capitol Hill ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Constitution ◽  
Election Results

The article examines the main political events that took place in the United States from the controversial election results to the tragic events on Capitol Hill for Trump supporters, which led to human casualties, finally untied the hands of the Democrats and allowed them to bury all the democratic values that America has taught the whole world since the adoption of the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights by the founding fathers of the state.

Some Origins of Nationalism in East Africa

1968 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. M. Lonsdale
Keyword(s):  
Central Government ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
National Movements ◽  
New Type ◽  
First Time ◽  
Official Recognition

This paper attempts to provide a frame of reference for evaluating the role of ordinary rural Africans in national movements, in the belief that scholarly preoccupation with élites will only partially illumine the mainsprings of nationalism. Kenya has been taken as the main field of enquiry, with contrasts and comparisons drawn from Uganda and Tanganyika. The processes of social change are discussed with a view to establishing that by the end of the colonial period one can talk of peasants rather than tribesmen in some of the more progressive areas. This change entailed a decline in the leadership functions of tribal chiefs who were also the official agents of colonial rule, but did not necessarily mean the firm establishment of a new type of rural leadership. The central part of the paper is taken up with an account of the competition between these older and newer leaderships, for official recognition rather than a mass following. A popular following was one of the conditions for such recognition, but neither really achieved this prior to 1945 except in Kikuyuland, and there the newer leaders did not want official recognition. After 1945 the newer leadership, comprising especially traders and officials of marketing co-operatives, seems everywhere to have won a properly representative position, due mainly to the enforced agrarian changes which brought the peasant face to face with the central government, perhaps for the first time. This confrontation, together with the experience of failure in earlier and more local political activity, resulted in a national revolution coalescing from below, co-ordinated rather than instigated by the educated élite.

scholarly journals Tuareg-Rebellion, Islamismus und Staatskrise in Mali

2013 ◽  
Vol 43 (170) ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Greven
Keyword(s):  
Social Relationship ◽  
Central Government ◽  
The State ◽  
Islamic Fundamentalism ◽  
Coup D'etat ◽  
The North ◽  
Majority Population ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Government ◽  
Spontaneous Reaction

The root causes of the ongoing crisis in Northern Mali lie in the region’s underdevelopment, exacerbated by longstanding, if recently decreasing, neglect of the central government; the complex social relationship between the largest minority, the Tuareg, and the majority population, which has worsened since a largely unresolved crisis in the 1990s; and the growing interest of a small but growing number of actors involved in the drug trade and other criminal activities in the absence of the state. Among the latter have been a growing number of Jihadists, at first mostly from Algeria, who have been taking Western citizens hostage and therefore caused the US and France to pressure the Malian government to re-establish a presence of the state in the North. The clash was all but inevitable when several thousand heavily armed Tuareg fighters came to Mali after the defeat of Gaddafi in Libya. A new element of the crisis is the growing number of jihadists among the Tuareg rebels and other Malians, but neither Tuareg irredentism nor Islamic fundamentalism has more than minority support in Mali, Northern Mali, or among the Tuareg. The coup d’état against the president, while most likely a spontaneous reaction to the inability of the government to fight the rebellion, uncovered a structural crisis of Malian democracy and society. The disintegration of Mali’s long-praised formal democratic institutions after the coup showed fundamental problems. However, political supporters of the coup who assumed that the population’s tacit support of the coup could be turned into a movement for fundamental social change, had to find that it was largely an opportunistic and diffuse expression of general discontent.

Jacksonian Consular Reform and the Forging of America’s First Global Bureaucracy

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-428
Author(s):  
SIMEON ANDONOV SIMEONOV
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
South America ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Government Regulation ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Us Foreign Policy ◽  
National Character ◽  
Department Of State ◽  
The Us ◽  
Professional Bureaucracy

AbstractAs revolutions swept across Central and South America in the 1820s and 1830s, Andrew Jackson’s administration undertook a landmark reform that transformed the US foreign policy apparatus into the nation’s first global bureaucracy. With the introduction of Edward Livingston’s 1833 consular reform bill to Congress, the nation embarked on a long path toward the modernization of its consular service in line with the powers of Europe and the new American republics. Despite the popularity of Livingston’s plan to turn a dated US consular service comprised of mercantile elites into a salaried professional bureaucracy, the Jacksonian consular reform dragged on for more than two decades before the passing of a consular bill in 1856. Contrary to Weberian models positing a straightforward path toward bureaucratization, the trajectory of Jacksonian consular reform demonstrates the power of mercantile elites to resist central government regulation just as much as it highlights how petty partisans—the protégé consuls appointed via the Jacksonian “spoils system”—powerfully shaped government policy to achieve personal advantages. In the constant tug-of-war between merchant-consuls and Jacksonian protégés, both groups mobilized competing visions of the “national character” in their correspondence with the Department of State and in the national press. Ultimately, the Jacksonian reform vision of an egalitarian and loyal consular officialdom prevailed over the old mercantile model of consulship as a promoter of national prestige and commercial expertise, but only after protégé consuls successfully exploited merchant-consuls’ perceived inability to compete with the salaried European officials across the sister-republics of the southwestern hemisphere.

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