6. Advantages and disadvantages of federalism

Author(s):  
Mark J. Rozell ◽  
Clyde Wilcox

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.

Author(s):  
Mark J. Rozell ◽  
Clyde Wilcox

“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.


Author(s):  
Zenoviy Siryk

Ukraine is a unitary state, yet historically various regions, oblasts, districts, and local areas have different levels of economic development. To secure sustainable economic and social development and provide social services guaranteed by the state for each citizen according to the Constitution, the mechanism of redistribution between revenues and expenditures of oblasts, regions, and territories through the budgets of a higher level is used. The paper aims to research the peculiarities of improving interbudgetary relations in conditions of authorities’ decentralization. The paper defines the nature of interbudgetary relations. The basic and reverse subsidies to Ukraine and Lvivska oblast are analyzed. The advantages and disadvantages the communities face at changing approaches to balancing local budgets are determined. Regulative documents that cover the interbudgetary relations in Ukraine are analyzed. Special attention is paid to the problem of local finances reforming, including the development of interbudgetary relations. The scheme of the economic interbudgetary relations system in Ukraine is developed. The ways to improve the system of interbudgetary relations in Ukraine are suggested. The negative and positive aspects, advantages, and disadvantages of the system of interbudgetary relations in Ukraine require the following improvements. 1. It is necessary to avoid the complete budget alignment in the process of budgets balancing by interbudgetary transfers as the major objective. 2. The interbudgetary transfers should be distributed based on a formal approach. 3. The changes have to be introduced to the calculation of medical and educational subsidies in terms of financial standard of budget provision to avoid the money deficit for coverage of necessary expenditures. 4. There is a need to improve interbudgetary relations at the levels of districts, villages, towns, and cities of district subordination. 5. Improvement of the mechanism of targeted benefits provision, their real evaluation, and control for the use of funds.


2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 392-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Federico Fabbrini

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?


1936 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Brooke Graves

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.


Author(s):  
Esme Choonara

The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 in the context of a COVID-19 pandemic that was already disproportionally impacting on the lives of people from black, Asian and other minority ethnicities in the UK and the US has provoked scrutiny of how racism impacts on all areas of our lives. This article will examine some competing theories of racism, and ask what theoretical tools we need to successfully confront racism in health and social care. In particular, it will scrutinise the different levels at which racism operates – individual, institutional and structural – and ask how these are related. Furthermore, it will argue against theories that see racism as a product of whiteness per se or ‘white supremacy’, insisting instead that racism should be understood as firmly bound to the functioning and perpetuation of capitalism.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 214-217
Author(s):  
Sergey Olegovich Buranok ◽  
Katerina Vyacheslavovna Belyaeva ◽  
Margarita Igorevna Tulusakova

The paper is dedicated to the evolutionary formation process of the American mass media perception towards the Soviet Russia during the severe Russian famine of 1921-1922, also known as the Povolzhye famine. The research novelty lies in the deep analysis of the US press assessments concerning the famine. The authors provide the results of their American newspapers examination regarding the image formation of the Soviet authorities, the Soviet people and the so-called Red Scare. The authors research included a review of the main anti-Soviet arguments made by the media; the review revealed that the Povolzhye famine image had a crucial role in the labeling Russia as a retrogressive country. Studying this informational phenomenon allows researchers to understand what impact it had on Soviet-American relations, since it directly affected the perception of Russia and the Russian/Soviet people through the media. This, in turn, might help with comprehension of some stereotypes about Russia that can still be encountered in the American public opinion to date.


Author(s):  
Thomas Greven

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.


2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-428
Author(s):  
SIMEON ANDONOV SIMEONOV

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.


Author(s):  
David Koffman ◽  
David Lewis

Four techniques are described for forecasting the demand for paratransit required by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA): surveys, intuitive comparison with other systems, cross-sectional econometric analysis, and time-series econometric analysis. The application of these methods in Seattle and New York is described, illustrating the advantages and disadvantages of each method. The ADA leaves considerable room for localities to determine the level of trip denials that can be tolerated. The econometric models provide a quantitative forecast of the effects of different levels of service availability as measured by trip denial rates. It demonstrates that the importance of service availability varies among communities.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document