Writing about immigration federalism has, like much federalism scholarship, long been stuck with an outdated model of federal-state relations. Under that old model, states wield power principally by possessing regulatory autonomy. But the reality today is quite different: as a number of writers have begun to document, state and local governments today are often empowered not by their autonomy, ...

The economic effects of federalism are unclear: some papers find that federalism has strong positive effects on a number of economically relevant variables, others find negative effects. The results often crucially hinge upon the proxies for federalism used. In this paper, we critically survey the existing indicators for both federalism and fiscal decentralization. We argue that federalism is a...

Introduction General Overviews Datasets Country Reports and Qualitative Data Journals Definitions of Federalism Federalism’s Purpose and Performance Economic Growth Economic Efficiency Deficit Reduction Corruption Redistribution and Unified Policy-Making Policy Innovation & Diffusion Peace-Preserving Federalism Secession Participation Effect on the Party System Understanding Variation in Federa...

There is an inherent tension between federalism and democracy. From the perspective of the constituent states that make up a federation, federalism constrains democracy because requirements of federal law may limit a state’s ability to adopt policies consistent with its citizens’ preferences. From the perspective of the federation as a whole, federalism constrains democracy because state govern...

ThisArticle broadly examines the conservative Rehnquist Court's federalism doctrines and, in doing so, explores the connections between judicial conservatism and a commitment to federalism. Three conclusions emerge First, although the Court has moved aggressively to advance federalism through well-known doctrines, it frequently proves more substantively conservative than it does profederalism w...

The distinct characteristic in James Buchanan’s thinking about federalism in contrast to the traditional theory of fiscal federalism is his view about fiscal competition. In this paper, it is demonstrated that this thinking went through three stages. From the 1950s to the beginning of the 1970s, his analyses were well embedded in the traditional fiscal federalism literature and concerned with e...

This paper explores the idea that institutional details matter and that attempts to estimate the economic effects of federalism by employing a simple dummy variable neglect potentially important institutional details. Based on a principal component analysis, seven aspects of both federalism and decentralization are used as variables for explaining differences in (1) fiscal policy, (2) governmen...

Defined as "the division of public authority between two or more constitutionally defined orders of government – and a set of ideas which underpin such institutions", federalism emphasizes issues such as shared and divided sovereignty, multiple loyalties and identities, and governance through multi‐level institutions. Proponents of federalism have linked federalism with improved economic and so...

State implementation of federal law is commonplace, but has been largely ignored by the interpretive doctrines of legislation and administrative law. We have no Chevron, federalism canon, or anything else for state implementation, nor any doctrines that ask how Congress's decisions to delegate implementation duties to states should affect how ambiguous statutes should be interpreted. For theori...

This paper suggests that stabilizing federalism is like solving a public good provision problem. It reviews results in the public good provision literature that are relevant for federalism, and discusses the implications of these results for the institutional design of federalism. 1For useful feedback, I thank seminar participants at Washington University, Duke, and Michigan. Federalism now rea...