The Democratic Deficit of United States Federalism? Red State, Blue State, Purple?

2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 645-667
Author(s):  
Vicki C Jackson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Legislature ◽  
Democratic Deficit ◽  
The Us ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Us Senate ◽  
The One ◽  
Over Time

Aspects of an entrenched constitution that were essential parts of founding compromises, and justified as necessary when a constitution was first adopted, may become less justifiable over time. Is this the case with respect to the structure of the United States Senate? The US Senate is hardwired in the Constitution to consist of an equal number of Senators from each state—the smallest of which currently has about 585,000 residents, and the largest of which has about 39.29 million. As this essay explains, over time, as population inequalities among states have grown larger, so too has the disproportionate voting power of smaller-population states in the national Senate. As a result of the ‘one-person, one-vote’ decisions of the 1960s that applied to both houses of state legislatures, each state legislature now is arguably more representative of its state population than the US Congress is of the US population. The ‘democratic deficit’ of the Senate, compared to state legislative bodies, also affects presidential (as compared to gubernatorial) elections. When founding compromises deeply entrenched in a constitution develop harder-to-justify consequences, should constitutional interpretation change responsively? Possible implications of the ‘democratic’ difference between the national and the state legislatures for US federalism doctrine are explored, especially with respect to the ‘pre-emption’ doctrine. Finally, the essay briefly considers the possibilities of federalism for addressing longer term issues of representation, polarisation and sustaining a single nation.

New US policy will increase Taiwan Strait tension

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Term Limits ◽  
Government Officials ◽  
New Developments ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Us ◽  
Us Senate ◽  
The One ◽  
High Level

Subject New developments in relations between Taiwan, China and the United States. Significance On February 28, the US Senate unanimously passed a bill, the Taiwan Travel Act, which -- when the president signs it into law -- will allow for high-level visits by government officials between Taiwan and the United States. China immediately criticised the measure, arguing that it undercut the ‘one-China’ principle on which China-US relations are based. China threatened vague retaliatory measures against Taiwan. Impacts China will ramp up pressure on Taiwan through military activities, such as airspace violations. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen will lose support within her party as she resists calls to pursue formal independence from China. Chinese President Xi Jinping's removal of presidential term limits and other illiberal policies will deepen suspicion of China in Taiwan.

Abstract WMP60: Temporal Trends in Incidence, Prevalence and Epidemiological Characteristics of Cerebral Venous Thrombosis in the United States

Stroke ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (Suppl_1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Fadar Otite ◽  
Smit Patel ◽  
Richa Sharma ◽  
Pushti Khandwala ◽  
Devashish Desai ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Risk Factors ◽  
Cerebral Venous Thrombosis ◽  
The United States ◽  
P Value ◽  
Joinpoint Regression ◽  
The Us ◽  
Epidemiological Characteristics ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Age And Sex

Background: The primary aim of this study is to describe current trends in racial-, age- and sex-specific incidence, clinical characteristics and burden of cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT) in the United States (US). Methods: Validated International Classification of Disease codes were used to identify all adult new cases of CVT (n=5,567) in the State Inpatients Database of New York and Florida (2006-2016) and all cases of CVT in the entire US from the National Inpatient Sample 2005-2016 (weighted n=57,315). Incident CVT counts were combined with annual US Census data to compute age and sex-specific incidence of CVT. Joinpoint regression was used to evaluate trends in incidence over time. Results: From 2005-2016, 0.47%-0.80% of all strokes in the US were CVTs but this proportion increased by 70.4% over time. Of all CVTs over this period, 66.7% were in females but this proportion declined over time (p<0.001). Pregnancy/puerperium (27.4%) and cancer (11.8%) were the most common risk factors in women, while cancer (19.5%) and central nervous trauma (11.3) were the most common in men. Whereas the prevalence of pregnancy/puerperium declined significantly over time in women, that of cancer, inflammatory conditions and trauma increased over time in both sexes. Annual age and sex-standardized incidence of CVT in cases/million population ranged from 13.9-20.2, but incidence varied significantly by sex (women: 20.3-26.9; men 6.8-16.8) and by age/sex (women 18-44yo: 24.0-32.6%; men: 18-44yo: 5.3-12.8). Age and sex-standardized incidence also differed by race (Blacks:18.6-27.2; whites: 14.3-18.5; Asians: 5.1-13.8). On joinpoint regression, incidence increased across 2006-2016 but most of this increase was driven by increase in all age groups of men (combined annualized percentage change (APC) 9.2%, p-value <0.001), women 45-64 yo (APC 7.8%, p-value <0.001) and women ≥65 yo (APC 7.4%, p-value <0.001). Incidence in women 18-44 yo remained unchanged over time . Conclusion: The epidemiological characteristics of CVT patients in the US is changing. Incidence increased significantly over the last decade. Further studies are needed to determine whether this increase represents a true increase from changing risk factors or artefactual increase from improved detection.

Remember the Ladies: Competition and Mobilization in the United States

2018 ◽  
pp. 83-132
Author(s):  
Dawn Langan Teele
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Political Geography ◽  
Gilded Age ◽  
Political Competition ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Us ◽  
Race Ethnicity

This chapter presents a case study of women's enfranchisement in the United States. It argues that the formation of a broad coalition of women, symbolized by growing membership in a large non-partisan suffrage organization, in combination with competitive conditions in state legislatures, was crucial to securing politicians' support for women's suffrage in the states. The chapter first gives a broad overview of the phases of the US suffrage movement, arguing that the salience of political cleavages related to race, ethnicity, nativity, and class influenced the type of movement suffragists sought to build. It then describes the political geography of the Gilded Age, showing how the diversity of political competition and party organization that characterized the several regions mirrors the pattern of women's enfranchisement across the states.

United States

2020 ◽  
pp. 91-126
Author(s):  
Christian Freudlsperger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Trade Openness ◽  
Type System ◽  
The United States ◽  
Power Sharing ◽  
High Propensity ◽  
The Us ◽  
Self Rule ◽  
Us Senate ◽  
Rule Systems

The first of the three case studies looks at the United States. It finds that while the states’ opportunities for individual exit have remained unconstrained in the non-coercive field of procurement in which federal pre-emption is not an option, no serious attempts have been made to systematically increase their voice. This is due, firstly, to the mechanics of the US senate-type system of multilevel representation and, secondly, to the lack of an institutionalized procedure of vertical collaboration in a policy environment characterized by ‘coercive federalism’. Persisting barriers in the internal market and a widespread politicization of international procurement liberalization as a threat to state sovereignty have further contributed to constituent units’ high propensity to seek exit from international constraints. Ultimately, the US case highlights the limits of self-rule systems in organizing trade openness across multiple levels of government. Endowing the states with little voice in polity-wide policy-making, the US model shows a marked tendency to breed resistance to internationally driven adaptational pressures among constituent units. As self-rule systems are built on a delineation of central and subcentral spheres of competence, they generally tend to lack the institutional means and ideational underpinnings to effectively organize collaborative power-sharing by establishing patterns of shared rule.

Western Europe and the collapse of Bretton Woods

2019 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 282-300
Author(s):  
Michael De Groot
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
The United States ◽  
Rate System ◽  
Bretton Woods ◽  
The Us ◽  
Exchange Rate System ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Impact

This article contends that Western Europe played a crucial and overlooked role in the collapse of Bretton Woods. Most scholars highlight the role of the United States, focusing on the impact of US balance of payments deficits, Washington’s inability to manage inflation, the weakness of the US dollar, and American domestic politics. Drawing on archival research in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, this article argues that Western European decisions to float their currencies at various points from 1969 to 1973 undermined the fixed exchange rate system. The British, Dutch, and West Germans opted to float their currencies as a means of protecting against imported inflation or protecting their reserve assets, but each float reinforced speculators’ expectations that governments would break from their fixed parities. The acceleration of financial globalization and the expansion of the Euromarkets in the 1960s made Bretton Woods increasingly difficult to defend.

The Watergate Crisis

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dafydd Townley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
The United States ◽  
Public Confidence ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Richard Nixon ◽  
The Us ◽  
National Headquarters ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S

The Watergate affair has become synonymous with political corruption and conspiracy. The crisis has, through fact, fiction, and debate, become considerably more than the arrest of five men breaking into the Democratic Party’s national headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington DC in the early hours of Saturday, June 17, 1972. Instead, the term “Watergate” has since come to represent the burglary, its failed cover-up, the press investigation, the Senate enquiry, and the eventual resignation of the thirty-seventh president of the United States, Richard Nixon. Arguably, Watergate has come to encompass all the illegalities of the Nixon administration. The crisis broke when the Vietnam War had already sunk public confidence in the executive to a low ebb, and in the context of a society already fractured by the turbulence of the 1960s. As such, Watergate is seen as the nadir of American democracy in the 20th century. Perversely, despite contemporaries’ genuine fears for the future of the US democratic system, the scandal highlighted the efficiency of the US governmental machine. The investigations that constituted the Watergate enquiry, which were conducted by the legislative and judicial branches and the fourth estate, exposed corruption in the executive of the United States that stretched to the holder of the highest office. The post-war decades had allowed an imperial presidency to develop, which had threatened the country’s political equilibrium. Watergate disclosed that the presidency had overreached its constitutional powers and responsibilities and had conspired to keep those moves hidden from the electorate. More significantly, however, the forced resignation of Richard Nixon revealed that the checks-and-balances system of government, which was conceived almost 200 years before the Watergate affair, worked as those who devised it had planned. Watergate should illustrate to Americans not just the dangers of consolidating great power in the office of the president, but also the means to counteract such growth.

The Adverse Consequences of the Politics of Agency Design for Presidential Management in the United States: The Relative Durability of Insulated Agencies

2004 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 377-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID E. LEWIS
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
The United States ◽  
Executive Branch ◽  
Us Congress ◽  
The Us ◽  
Presidential Management ◽  
Agency Design ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Expected Duration

The US Congress has often sought to limit presidential influence over certain public policies by designing agencies that are insulated from presidential control. Whether or not insulated agencies persist over time has important consequences for presidential management. If those agencies that persist over time are also those that are the most immune from presidential direction, this has potentially fatal consequences for the president's ability to manage the executive branch. Modern presidents will preside over a less and less manageable bureaucracy over time. This article explains why agencies insulated from presidential control are more durable than other agencies and shows that they have a significantly higher expected duration than other agencies. The conclusion is that modern American presidents preside over a bureaucracy that is increasingly insulated from their control.

The Committee System in State Legislatures

1918 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 607-639 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Lysle Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
State Legislatures ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Legislature ◽  
Legislative Organization ◽  
Practical Operation ◽  
Conference Committee ◽  
Committee Assignments

Every state legislature in the United States is divided into a considerable number of standing committees. In spite of obvious advantages which seem to render it indispensable, the development of the committee system has been attended by great evils. Indeed, it is perhaps not too much to say that with the committee system the worst evils connected with legislative organization and procedure are intimately associated.It is the chief purpose of this paper to point out the principal weaknesses or defects of the committee system in connection with state legislatures generally, and particularly the defects which have appeared in the practical operation of the system in the Illinois legislature; and at the same time to discuss certain proposals designed to remedy these defects.These weaknesses and proposed remedies will be taken up in the following order:I. Defects in the methods of making committee assignments.II. Defects due to the number of standing committees.III. Defects due to the size of committees.IV. Defects due to the lack of a definite and fixed schedule of committee meetings.V. Defects due to the lack of publicity and to the irresponsibility surrounding committee proceedings.VI. Defects due to the insufficient control of each house over its committees.VII. Defects peculiar to the committee on rules and the conference committee.

scholarly journals The Changing Shape of the World Automobile Industry: A Multilayer Network Analysis of International Trade in Components and Parts

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margherita Russo ◽  
◽  
Fabrizio Alboni ◽  
Jorge Carreto Sanginés ◽  
Manlio De Domenico ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Network Analysis ◽  
Trade Agreement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Trade Network ◽  
Trade Relations ◽  
Automotive Components ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Over Time

In 2018, after 25 years of the North America Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the United States requested new rules which, among other requirements, increased the regional con-tent in the production of automotive components and parts traded between the three part-ner countries, United States, Canada and Mexico. Signed by all three countries, the new trade agreement, USMCA, is to go into force in 2022. Nonetheless, after the 2020 Presi-dential election, the new treaty's future is under discussion, and its impact on the automo-tive industry is not entirely defined. Another significant shift in this industry – the acceler-ated rise of electric vehicles – also occurred in 2020: while the COVID-19 pandemic largely halted most plants in the automotive value chain all over the world, at the reopen-ing, the tide is now running against internal combustion engine vehicles, at least in the an-nouncements and in some large investments planned in Europe, Asia and the US. The definition of the pre-pandemic situation is a very helpful starting point for the analysis of the possible repercussions of the technological and geo-political transition, which has been accelerated by the epidemic, on geographical clusters and sectorial special-isations of the main regions and countries. This paper analyses the trade networks emerg-ing in the past 25 years in a new analytical framework. In the economic literature on inter-national trade, the study of the automotive global value chains has been addressed by us-ing network analysis, focusing on the centrality of geographical regions and countries while largely overlooking the contribution of countries' bilateral trading in components and parts as structuring forces of the subnetwork of countries and their specific position in the overall trade network. The paper focuses on such subnetworks as meso-level structures emerging in trade network over the last 25 years. Using the Infomap multilayer clustering algorithm, we are able to identify clusters of countries and their specific trades in the automotive internation-al trade network and to highlight the relative importance of each cluster, the interconnec-tions between them, and the contribution of countries and of components and parts in the clusters. We draw the data from the UN Comtrade database of directed export and import flows of 30 automotive components and parts among 42 countries (accounting for 98% of world trade flows of those items). The paper highlights the changes that occurred over 25 years in the geography of the trade relations, with particular with regard to denser and more hierarchical network gener-ated by Germany’s trade relations within EU countries and by the US preferential trade agreements with Canada and Mexico, and the upsurge of China. With a similar overall va-riety of traded components and parts within the main clusters (dominated respectively by Germany, US and Japan-China), the Infomap multilayer analysis singles out which com-ponents and parts determined the relative positions of countries in the various clusters and the changes over time in the relative positions of countries and their specialisations in mul-tilateral trades. Connections between clusters increase over time, while the relative im-portance of the main clusters and of some individual countries change significantly. The focus on US and Mexico and on Germany and Central Eastern European countries (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Slovakia) will drive the comparative analysis.

scholarly journals Cross-National Outcomes of a Digital Weight Loss Intervention in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom and Ireland, and Australia and New Zealand: A Retrospective Analysis

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qiuchen Yang ◽  
Ellen Siobhan Mitchell ◽  
Annabell S. Ho ◽  
Laura DeLuca ◽  
Heather Behr ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Weight Loss ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Mixed Models ◽  
Linear Mixed Models ◽  
The United States ◽  
Weight Loss Intervention ◽  
The Us ◽  
Over Time

Mobile health (mHealth) interventions are ubiquitous and effective treatment options for obesity. There is a widespread assumption that the mHealth interventions will be equally effective in other locations. In an initial test of this assumption, this retrospective study assesses weight loss and engagement with an mHealth behavior change weight loss intervention developed in the United States (US) in four English-speaking regions: the US, Australia and New Zealand (AU/NZ), Canada (CA), and the United Kingdom and Ireland (UK/IE). Data for 18,459 participants were extracted from the database of Noom's Healthy Weight Program. Self-reported weight was collected every week until program end (week 16). Engagement was measured using user-logged and automatically recorded actions. Linear mixed models were used to evaluate change in weight over time, and ANOVAs evaluated differences in engagement. In all regions, 27.2–33.2% of participants achieved at least 5% weight loss by week 16, with an average of 3–3.7% weight loss. Linear mixed models revealed similar weight outcomes in each region compared to the US, with a few differences. Engagement, however, significantly differed across regions (P &lt; 0.001 on 5 of 6 factors). Depending on the level of engagement, the rate of weight loss over time differed for AU/NZ and UK/IE compared to the US. Our findings have important implications for the use and understanding of digital weight loss interventions worldwide. Future research should investigate the determinants of cross-country engagement differences and their long-term effects on intervention outcomes.

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