Federalism and Political Culture

Aaron Wildavsky, Aaron Wildavsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000675719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Aaron Wildavsky well understood that federalism is about freedom and diversity - not hierarchy and decentralization. His was an intensely normative concern with the promise of federalism and its abandonment in the United States. Over time, he became increasingly focused on political culture, federalism, and the Western domains of social life as fields of cultural competition. Although his interest in federalism was overshadowed by his work on political culture, it remained a visible theme in his writing. Federalism and Political Culture is a collection of Wildavsky's essays on federalism over the latter part of his career. It is the second in a series, of his posthumous collected writings. Federalism is not a conventional collection on comparative federal systems, but deals with what federalism means, how it should work, and how it has been abused by those in power who protested their commitment to federal principles and practices but acted otherwise. Wildavsky's analyses concentrate mainly on American federalism after the Great Society of the 1960s which brought major changes to the American federal system. The essays trace the progress of his thought as he first argues that true federalism is noncentralization, then to federalism as competition, and then combines both in reasserting that real federalism is possible only in a confederation.

1

E Pluribus Unum: Plurality, Diversity, Variety, and Modesty

Sometimes simplicity is a virtue, sometimes it is a curse. In the study of federalism it has become a curse. We take it as axiomatic that every mode of social organization has its contradictions and that none is satisfactory under all circumstances. Following Aristotle, there has been a search for mixed regimes, hopefully combining the best and avoiding the worst. Thus federalism has been proposed as a combination of opposing principles, centralization and noncentralization, both hopefully locked in a creative tension. Yet the proliferation of names of the motley crew of resulting forms should give us pause. Maybe there are more than two ways to organize life and more than a few composite regimes that come about from mixing them up.

Virtually all the modern study of organizations is concerned with bureaucracy. The hierarchy, with its nest of inverted Chinese boxes, its specialization and division of labor, its inculcation of the sacrifice of the parts for the whole, has been virtually the only form to receive serious consideration. Noncentralization, or self-organizing systems, based on spontaneous rearrangements among independent entities, comes in belatedly by virtue of contrast. Thus political regimes are either centralized and hierarchical or noncentralized and competitive. Is there, then, nothing in between? There is the egalitarian regime, sometimes called “collegiums” or “clans.” Egalitarian organizations are characterized by a purely voluntary form of organization in which members are roughly equal in resources as well as in decision-making ability. Mixing the three—centralization, noncentralization, and equality—leads to more variety than current conceptions allow.

Centralization via hierarchy is one answer to the problem of social order; the people involved are to live together by accepting structured inequality, a place for everyone and everyone in his/her place. Its advantages lie in the subordination of individual egoism to the collective community. Pomp may belong to the higher orders but lower strata also get protection because they are recognized as belonging to the same collective. Evils range from dictatorship, to stultification, to inability to recognize or learn from mistakes. The mitigating cure is often called “decentralization”—a delegation of authority on a regional or functional basis. This increases local efficiency at the cost of lengthening the distance between the central authorities and those closer to the conditions and people affected. The evil of noncentralization is either lack of community, resulting in dependence on hierarchy for maintaining and altering the rules governing transactions, or unbridled competition, leaving those without entry fees to drop out. The resulting inequalities create strains in the social fabric. The evils of egalitarianism are both a lack of authority, which leads to interminable delay, and rampant envy over small differences, which leads to perpetual splits and an inability to tolerate factional competition, leading to endless charges of conspiracy for bringing inegalitarian measures into a purported community of equals.

What happens when these forms coexist and interpenetrate one another? Whether we talk about political democracy, scientific activity, or economic growth—all these crucial aspects of modernization are based on competition. Democracy is often conceived of as competition for office, science as competition over ideas, and economic growth as competition for resources. Some of the curse is taken off centralization by placing hierarchies in competition with one another, whether in elections, markets, or striving for fame. Some of the curse is taken from markets by hedging them about with restrictions, limiting freedom of contract, and establishing a social minimum. And some of the onus is taken from egalitarianism by limiting the amount of redistribution, adhering to criteria of merit, and maintaining economic growth, which permits rewards to increase even if inequality is not significantly diminished. The uneasy combination of organizational forms, this armed truce between rival visions of the good life, is encapsulated in the American romance with federalism: E pluribus unum.

We all agree that federalism is good, which helps us agree to disagree over exactly what it is, so that different political regimes can continue to coexist. The costs of federalism, conceived not merely as a division of legal responsibility for governmental functions but as the diverse organizational elements of modern pluralist democracy (pluralism standing for a combination of organizational forms), are the costs of this delicate balancing act, so delicate that at no one time or under no set of conditions can it possibly be satisfactory to the adherents of its constituent elements.

A Plurality of Conceptions

What are the costs of federalism? “The price of more pluralism,” Nelson Polsby writes, “is a less orderly political life.” The price is paid in terms of contradiction:

What individualists cannot choose, of course, is a society in which they retain the right to move about as they like or need, exercising their options to change their jobs, marital status, geographic location, names, hair, lifestyles, political commitments, while others hold still and provide them with the comforting support systems—stable neighborhoods, lifelong friendships, personalized and unbureaucratic professional services—of a more stable, confining, and less resourceful age.¹

Parties decline in favor of the media, and trust in leaders and institutions depreciates in favor of individual choice. Apparently we cannot have unfettered personal expressiveness and a stable collective life. Put that way, put pungently, so we cannot avoid the contradiction, Americans are indeed getting what they want even if, looking at the collective consequences of individual choices, these are not always (or often) what the very same people think they need.

Every regime, Theodore Lowi tells us, ultimately creates a politics consonant with itself. That is why, seeing contemporary politics triangulated rather than bifurcated, he foresees the probability of a three-party system, with one of the parties a socialist party with a social-democratic program. If it hasn’t happened yet, the new party may be just around the comer. Why, he asks, has there been no strong socialist party in America’s past? Because, he answers, pointing to the paltry constitutional powers given to and exercised by the national government until the 1930s, “with the state governments as the course of legitimation for … capitalism … there was simply no common political experience that would lend much plausibility to a socialist analysis of American society or a socialist critique of American capitalism.”² Why is there, then, an enhanced probability of a party dedicated to socialism today? His answer is that “the expansion and strengthening of a national state … is the one condition conducive to the emergence of a bona fide socialism in the United States.”³ It is not society that creates a socialist regime in Lowi’s causal connection, but the enlarged state that creates the conditions for socialism.

Observe that where Polsby stresses social changes affecting political structure, Lowi views the policy reversal of the federal government and the states (“federalism in economic matters has all but disappeared” and “national government policies were fairly frequently antagonistic to capitalism”) as affecting political structure.⁴ This is another example of the Schattschneider-Lowi doctrine that policy causes politics and vice versa.⁵

If Polsby’s piece can be taken to exemplify the argument of political sociology, and Lowi’s constitutional approach the argument for political structure, my essay is an attempt to add political culture —the shared values legitimating desired social relations that make up the plural political forces in the United States.⁶ The division of power between levels of government is dependent not only on geographic separation fortified by constitutional representation but also on social differences. A person living in the same town or neighborhood most of his life, for instance, might be motivated to climb the party ladder to a position of prominence. The same person who keeps changing residence (as Jo Freeman pointed out to me) might be better off attaching herself to a national interest group, available whenever she wants and willing to recognize prior participation no matter where it occurred. The major political parties, especially the Democratic party, have been able to accommodate and to an extent co-opt the new interest groups in time-honored fashion. More recently the Republican party has opened up to (some would say been “taken over by”) Protestant fundamentalists. Where, then, might social democracy, if not socialism, the former less interested in nationalization of industry than the latter, come from? According to my calculus of political regimes, centralization, bringing with it the strong national government social democracy requires, constitutes a commitment to hierarchy, a commitment far from the pluralist forces of self-expression Polsby identifies. Social democracy could come (and undoubtedly does stem) from a belief in greater equality of result, a belief not too far removed from other ways of diminishing differences among people visible nowadays—sexual freedom, gender equality, challenges to expertise, reduction of regionalism.

If the main impulse leading toward social democracy is a desire for purely voluntary social relationships, with mutual consent required anew in each and every transaction, an anomaly may be explained and a deeper difficulty revealed. The anomaly is the coexistence of demands on government for redistribution with a withdrawal of authority from the very same bureaucracy that has to make good the promises.⁷ The desire for equal outcomes may well lead to demands for government to share incomes, while the desire for voluntary association may simultaneously lead to resistance to the coercion involved in doing that very thing. The deep difficulty referred to is that social democracy has a chance to thrive when its main instrument—governmental action—is regarded as a positive good. Authority and responsibility remain within hailing distance. But a form of socialism that distrusts hierarchical authority—that is, the very kind on which it is most dependent—is likely to self-destruct. Self-organizing federalism is impossible without a semblance of a center. Centralization without a center is a contradiction in terms.

A Diversity of Practices

“Nearly everything has become intergovernmental.” With these words Donald Kettl sums up the current state of affairs, for in our time “it has become far more difficult to differentiate national, state, and local functions.”⁸ Along the way, participation in making and implementing policy by all sorts of private interests and levels of government has markedly increased. The prior specialization by level of government has been superseded by specialization according to program. The theme has been expansion—of federal funds, programs, issue networks, models of delivery, judicial involvement, and concern over the concomitant diffusion of responsibility. Distributive politics in Congress, Kettl concludes, has been rivaled both by administrative rule-making and by judicial determination of what the substance of the policy is really supposed to be, a determination often guided by different notions of equality. Meanwhile, a good deal of actual service delivery has been contracted out to private providers, adding further to the number and kind of stakeholders in the federal system.

There is no doubt that the federal system has proved adaptable. But the cost of adaptability has been a decline in accountability. “Such a system,” Kettl warns, “makes it difficult to determine just who is responsible for a problem at hand or how it can be resolved. Furthermore, it makes it impossible for anyone to tackle the problems of the system as a whole.”⁹ Coordination has been sacrificed for responsiveness.

So what? To those who seek centralization and the maintenance of hierarchical differences specifying the correct division of labor, the federal “mishmash” is a nightmare. If everyone is in charge somewhere, someplace, sometime, then no one center of authority is in charge all the time. I take it that, according to the framers of the Constitution, that is the way it is supposed to be. But the Constitution is, of course, silent on how fragmented relationships within and among policies are supposed to be.

It might be thought that extreme fragmentation would be sufficiently like a market to satisfy supporters of noncentralization. Not really. There is a political market for programs but it is hardly unfettered. Thus adherents of competitive individualism have sought to replace categorical grants, stipulating what is to be done, with block grants giving states and localities greater latitude. So long as the states are playing with other people’s money, however, rather than asking what they are prepared to give up in taxes to get what they want in services (a good is worth what one has to give up to get it), so long as the doctrine of opportunity costs does not apply, markets are being administered and there can be no genuine state and local consumer sovereignty. Transferring taxing powers to states would suit the market mentality better than passing costs on to taxpayers in other jurisdictions.

Egalitarians are in a quandary: the more centralized programs become and the narrower their focus, the greater the likelihood that funds will be targeted toward those most in need. Here they join with centralizers in urging that the parts of the federal system sacrifice for the whole by redistributing income. Thus egalitarians press for categorical grants and judicial intervention to raise the rate of redistribution. They want expenditures per pupil to be uniform across the United States. By the same token, homogenizing outcomes decreases diversity, thus decreasing responsiveness to locally determined needs. Here egalitarians would ally with noncentralizers. If small is not always beautiful to them, at least it is not as ugly as large-scale domination.

Much the same is true of noncentralization and equal results. All ends are partially but not wholly achieved. Viewed one way, this is a trite conclusion, merely restating the pattern of a mixed system with which we are all familiar. Viewed another way, we have an answer to an important political question: how come nearly everyone is dissatisfied with the current condition of the federal system? Given the expanded size of programs, there is more centralization, noncentralization, and equal distribution than before. That is just it; since no set of political preferences has been entirely satisfied, yet none has lost out entirely, partisans of each are dissatisfied. But the one thin...