The multiple faces of federal government

.

Chapter 8 in Rethinking Public Choice, 2022, pp 101-113 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Federalism is often thought to be a form of government that favors liberty, in contrast to unitary forms of government. Federalism as a form of government actually presents several faces to the world, only one of which is liberty. Domination is another face, with some dominant interest often capable of being promoted more fully under federalism than under other forms of government. Yet another face is as laboratories of policy experimentation where different states can try different policy measures. While it is common to contrast federal and unitary forms of government, of far greater significance than this abstract contrast is recognition that the historical record reveals numerous substantive examples of each abstract form. With a unitary form, only one governmental entity can tax and regulate. With a federal form, multiple governments can do so. Whether the federal form truly promotes liberty is a challenging question to address.

Keywords: Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781802204742.00012.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:21160_8

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().