The Resilience of the American Federal System

Abstract

Federal systems of governance have the capacity to be robust— meaning that despite internal and external changing circumstances, they can continue to produce the benefits of a decentralized but internally coordinated polity. Whether or not a federal system is robust is a function of its institutional design and federal culture. The American federal system, distributing authority between levels of government, has been remarkably resilient, failing only once during the past two centuries. Its resilience surprises many who keep expecting it to wither away as the national government grows. In this chapter I make two contributions. In the first part, I review the claims of the American federation’s inherent centralization, and suggest the evidence as well as institutional and cultural reasons why federalism may still be meaningful in the American context. Second, I present the science of federal robustness: its key is its adaptability, provided by a set of safeguards that jointly protect federalism’s boundaries while permitting experimentation around the edges. Future progress in the study of federalism obliges us to move beyond the standard equlibrium-based analysis to take a more dynamic view of federal system design and