Sub-state Governments Research Articles

Constitutional Remedies for Government Overload

In this paper, various forms of governmental organisation are presented in the light of their capacity to overcome overload. After the importance of municipalities has been stressed, two administrative devices are presented: decongestion and deconcentration. Further questions for and against decentralisation are analysed and the concepts of regionalism and autonomy explained. It is argued that the cornerstone of the rights of substate government is the principle of subsidiarity. The conclusion is made that federalism is the only fundamental solution to guaranteeing this principle as well as preventing governmental overload.

An empirical analysis of state and local tax structure in the context of the Leviathan model of government

This paper has investigated the ability of an extreme and relatively simple model of political behavior to explain the level of revenues generated by state and local governments. In general, the behavior of these governments appears to be at least consistent with many of the fiscal outcomes predicted by the Leviathan theory. Several, although not all, of the specific Leviathan theory hypotheses considered received empirical support. The evidence was consistent with the hypothesis that states utilizing comprehensive tax bases, especially a personal income tax, can be expected to generate higher levels of aggregate revenues. Strong support was also observed for the contention that intergovernmental competition by general-purpose substate governments may serve as a substitute for constitutional constraints in limiting the revenue generating power of local governments.