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FEDERAL SYSTEMS: INSTITUTIONAL DESIGN AND POLITICAL AGENCY
B. Guy Peters, Eduardo Grin and Fernando Luiz Abrucio
ABSTRACT
If intergovernmental relations are necessary in normal times, it should be even more required to face complex intergovernmental problem (CIP) as the COVID-19 pandemic. However, collaboration between governments depends on institutional rules as well as on political will. To discuss this issue, the analytical model is based on two dimensions: institutional design and political agency. As for the first dimension, since COVID-19 pandemic is considered as a CIP, three aspects are relevant when discussing how federations can organize the coordination between different levels of government: autonomy of subnational governments, mechanisms of coordination, and policy portfolio. As for political agency, the performance of political leadership (national presidents and governors) will be analyzed. The possibility of sharing collective goals across the federation is also a consequence of the political agency that takes place within the institutional systems of each federation. In short, it seeks to analyze the relationship between institutional design and political agency to deal with this CIP in five American federations.
Keywords: Political agency; subnational autonomy; policy portfolio; mechanisms of coordination; complex intergovernmental problem; intergovernmental relations
Federal Systems: Institutional Design and Its Constitutive Dimensions
One of the classic distinctions in comparative politics is that between federal and unitary systems. As is true of other such institutional variations (Peters, 2018), there are both advantages and disadvantages for each of those forms of government. Uniformity and the capacity of a unitary regime to deal with larger scale problems can be weighed against the capacity to match local needs and preferences in a federal one. Federalism is based on the shared rule and self-rule formula (Elazar, 1987), and the power sharing is its crucial issue (Dardanelli et al., 2018, p. 1).
Perhaps most importantly, subnational governments can be the ālaboratories of democracy,ā as stated by Mr. Justice Brandeis1 concerning the United States, and they can provide opportunities for innovation and experimentation. Federations tend to offer more opportunities for participation whereas in unitary countries the efficiency side normally is more salient in decision-making. This trade-off between more democracy or more efficiency is also used to compare levels of decentralization and centralization in federations (Philipmore, 2013).
Federalism should provide policymakers with a greater capacity to match the scale of action with the scale of the problem being addressed than other means of organizing territorial governance. Large-scale national problems can be addressed by the central government, while smaller scale delivery problems can be addressed more effectively through subnational governments.2 There will be problems of vertical coordination (Adam, Hurka, Knill, Peters, & Steinebach, 2019) within a federal system, and the multilevel nature of governance for any significant policy issue will require cooperation across level through of a more flexible and polycentric governance platform.
The federalism constitutes a complex institutional context of divided powers exerted in different spheres as well as a setting of rules, practices, and norms accrued from intergovernmental interactions. Thus, three are the main bonds among institutional arenas: (1) vertical differentiation of authority between territorial governments; (2) horizontal relationships among subnational governments; (3) intergovernmental arenas that reinforce the federal system itself (Benz & Broschek, 2013).
The examples of success and failure in dealing with the pandemic above mentioned contain both federal and unitary political systems. So, we need to consider the nature of federalism more precisely and attempt to determine what it is about different forms of federalism that may affect their capacity to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, and indeed any other large scale and complex crisis. The alternative hypothesis is that the major determinant of success or failure is not the characteristics of the systems, but rather the individuals who occupy positions of political leadership within those governments both at national or subnational level.
The theoretical model includes both hypotheses, as we seek to analyze how institutional design can function as a federalist safeguard (Bednar, 2009; Bolleyer, 2009) against individual shortcomings, and how political leadership of presidents, prime ministers, or governors can overcome individual failings. We will analyze the features of federal institutional resilience (Bednar, 2009) and the behavior and profile of political leaders (Dardanelli et al., 2018) to understand national responses to deal with pandemic. In effect, the analysis of tackling with the COVID-19 as a complex intergovernmental problem (CIP) should consider the federal design as well as the role of the political leaders to understand the implemented actions in each country.
The national cases that will be analyzed can be featured through federal struggles that feature good or bad behaviors by leaders, and better or worse functioning of their federal institutions. The nature of this CIP is focused on how governance systems and political actors (Paquet & Schertzer, 2020, p. 1) adapt to tackle with the pandemic as a huge external shock over federal institutions. So, we address two main questions: What factors within federal systems could be related to the success or failure of their attempts to face this crisis? How political leaders have been acting in federative arena along with subnational levels of government?
The analytical model is based on two dimensions: institutional design and political agency. As for the first dimension, there is a long list of possible answers about what factors matter (Bednar, 2009; Dardanelli et al., 2018; Hueglin & Fenna, 2015). In this book, considering the COVID-19 pandemic as a CIP, we think that three aspects are relevant: autonomy of subnational governments, mechanisms of coordination, and policy portfolio. As for political agency, we will analyze the performance of political leadership (national presidents and governors). We analyze the matching between institutional design and the political agency to deal with this CIP in five American federations.
Subnational Autonomy
Although autonomy is not an easy concept to define, the development of the modern self-government in Western countries since the nineteenth century had had as one of the main goals to limit national governments intrusion into local matters. Subnational units were established as legal orders of government, albeit never totally free from a national steering. Their status generated political, economic, and legal barriers against more arbitrary intervention from upper levels. They would be free to deal with most local problems, albeit not free from national interference in national policy matters. This conception positively grounded the construction of autonomy as core characteristic to analyze intergovernmental relationships, especially in contexts of decentralization or/and federalism (Agranoff, 2004).
Therefore, the first factor in the analysis is the degree of autonomy of the states, provinces, or even municipalities.3 The constitutional base of the power division between, at least two levels of government, is a core issue as it defines the features of authority exerted by national and subnational spheres. Political conflicts and disputes on policy jurisdiction are central to the territorial politics in federations. It is often unclear whether autonomy is a fixed characteristics in time since federal dynamics moves according to āpatterns of continuity and changeā (Benz & Broschek, 2013). Taking ideal types of federations, the dualistic ones like United Stated and Canada should be more decentralized, Mexico would be more centralized, and Argentina and Brazil would be intermediate cases.
Considering intergovernmental cooperation, the reduction and/or lack of federal support may affect states and municipalities both in their own public policies and programs as well as those ones came from national government. Both the excess or the absence of federal government are problematic options. The role of federal coordination is essential to implement national public policies. In opposition to the dualist model, for the cooperative federalism shared authority is the best way for both subnational autonomy and national coordination (Elazar, 1987, 1994). For this conception, federations are not formed by state and local governments acting independently from each other since this kind of territorial split power needs collaboration and coordination among national and local governments.
Subnational autonomy can be better analyzed as a historic trajectory that generates institutionalized rules that order the relations among governments. In other words, federations have a meaningful temporal and spatial variance of institutional resources in their territorial governments which affect the way how they build mutual relationships (Benz & Broschek, 2013). For instance, path dependence could explain the characteristics of these intergovernmental links. Thus, if one federation has a more integrative or decentralized profile, this has to do with its history (Broschek, 2011).
In some federations (e.g. Belgium), there is very little capacity of the central government to control the decisions from regional governments, while in others such as Australia, the states have little autonomy to make their own decisions. In the United States, the legislative division of powers represents the model of dualistic federalism. In Germany, legislation jointly designed by national government and the LƤnder (Hueglin & Fenna, 2015), but each level has some autonomous legislative powers which require vertical coordination (Adam et al., 2019).
The level of autonomy and the distribution of authority can be a constitutional bedrock, and to comply, it is a duty for all governments and political leaders, besides useful to analyze federative robustness (Bednar, 2009). Constitutional autonomy uses to be based on exclusive, common, or competitive liabilities among different levels of government. This design is a safeguard for preserving territorial distributional authority as well as to avoid opportunistic behaviors.
For example, if central governmental actions go beyond state authority, it could be considered encroachment. However, if subnational governments do not obey federal rules, as well as if they cannot implement their own responsibilities within federal system, they probably will engage in shirking. Finally, if a State A has the purpose of discharging the weight of a public policy over the State B, it will be involved in burden shifting. Too much encroachment, shirking, or burden shifting is responsible for creating intergovernmental strains that threaten the functioning of federal system (Bednar, 2009, p. 9).
The three situations are affected by the scope of subnational autonomy, even if each of them can produce different political behaviors and effects. While encroaching represents an excess and expansion in the national actions, shirking and burden shifting usually depend on a more autonomous attitudes of local government. Similarly, the rationale of the opportunistic federalism or gaming (Philipmore, 2013) through which governmental actors in all levels game one another order to get policies goals regardless the limits in the split power among them. All governments seek their own interests with little concerns about collective consequences (Conlan, 2006).
However, if the constitutional structure of shared rule and self-government loses support may increase the likelihood of placing āindividual political and jurisdictional interests above common goalsā (Conlan, 2006, p. 667). Another form of weakening autonomy is through preemption when national government enacts laws reducing the scope of statutory states authority (Agranoff & McGuire, 2001).
Another approach that can also be used to analyze the kind of intergovernmental relations (IGR) is based on the unilateralism of federal government. The concentration of decisional power in the national level conveys to a more centralized stance and can threaten the federal system if this model deepens to the point that the constitutive units become agents of national government. This centralization usually happens when federal government unilaterally settle political and public policy issues which affect issues both for in national as well as subnational jurisdictions. Since federal governments are the main guarantors of national unity, and because they generally have more revenue than subnational entities, they seek to find encompassing solutions covering all national territory. Because of that, on one hand, federal government can decide to enact its own solutions or even impose measures over state and local governments in the name of the national interest. On the other hand, the federal government may not comply with a political solution agreed with the constitutive entities (Schnabel, 2020, pp. 10ā11). All kinds of unilateralism, of different manners, reduce the subnational autonomy.
Even in normal times, federal struggles can be a tug of war between all levels of government. But when governments must face CIP (Paquet & Schertzer, 2020), as the COVID-19 pandemic, two questions become relevant. The first is whether subnational constitutional autonomy could be ero...
