Scholars argue that the causes of America’s governance crisis lie with state and local governments.
Over the last decade, scholars have increasingly warned of an ongoing crisis in American governance, the ability of governments to implement policies to achieve their goals.
In a recent article, David Schleicher of Yale Law School and Nicholas Bagley of Michigan Law explain that overemphasis on the failures of the federal government has led to a scholarly “misdiagnosis.” They argue, instead, that the shortcomings of state and local governments are at the root of this crisis.
Schleicher and Bagley begin with the “old joke” that the federal government is an insurance company with an army. An oversimplification, like all good jokes, but an illustrative one: they explain that—other than Medicare and Social Security for the elderly—the great majority of government services that Americans rely on in their day-to-day lives are not delivered by the federal government. State and local governments provide and, in large part, fund services such as education, firefighting, policing, and are responsible for developing and maintaining most American infrastructure.
The crisis of American governance is largely a crisis of the capacity of state and local government to deliver these services, Schleicher and Bagley reason. They explain that similar capacity deficits recur across a wide range of state and local governments, suggesting that this crisis is a structural consequence of the American system of government—not the result of local mismanagement.
Schleicher and Bagley offer three explanations for the governance failures of state and local governments in the United States.
The first is electoral. Voters lack knowledge about state elections and increasingly select candidates from the same party as their preferred candidates for President and Congress. Schleicher and Bagley argue that the nationalization of state and local elections reduces the accountability and responsiveness of state legislatures and local governing bodies to local conditions and policy needs.
The second is procedural. The costs imposed by federal administrative law are a central focus of existing scholarship on government capacity. But Schleicher and Bagley observe that state administrative law often imposes public participation and other procedural requirements that are at least as—and often more—onerous than their federal equivalents.
Finally, Schleicher and Bagley identify a blind spot shared by most scholars and policymakers that study government capacity: budgets. They argue that this blind spot is a natural consequence of scholars’ fixation on the federal government, which wields immense fiscal powers, including, vitally, control over monetary policy and the ability to deficit-spend during recessions. State and local governments have no control over the money supply and face legal and practical barriers to debt-financing government services. During recessions, tax revenues fall, and state and local governments must either raise taxes or cut services—hamstringing government capacity when it is needed most, Schleicher and Bagley contend.
Focusing on the state and local causes of the American governance crisis casts the capacity of the federal government in a different light. Schleicher and Bagley note that, in this century alone, the federal government fought two major wars abroad, expanded health insurance coverage to tens of millions of Americans without inflating the costs of health care, and blunted the effects of the last two major economic shocks more effectively than most peer nations. An “OK” record for an insurance company with an army, they suggest.
Schleicher and Bagley do not contend that the federal government plays no role in the failures of state and local governance. Contemporary problems at the state and local level may stem from past congressional action or inaction, such as inadequate or misguided federal fiscal policy or over- or under-regulation by federal administrative agencies. And they maintain that criticism of the failures of the federal government to meet its own responsibilities has its place.
But Schleicher and Bagley insist that any analysis of this crisis will be flawed—likely fatally—unless it reflects a key truth about the American system of governance: the central role of state and local governments.
Solutions to the wrong problems are no solutions at all, they warn, pressing scholars and policymakers to account for the key role of state and local governments as they seek to understand and ameliorate the American governance crisis.
And solutions to this crisis will not come from Washington, D.C., Schleicher and Bagley conclude. They urge concerned citizens and reformers to focus instead on the true seats of American governance: “Lansing and Hartford, Sacramento and Austin, Los Angeles County and New York City.”
