Disharmony in Federal Government

Abstract

One can look at federalism as being of 2 types: (I) centralized federalization in which national officials are chosen directly & govern directly without interference from state officials, & (H) periphicalized federalism in which national officials refer decisions to constituent gov's. Type I usually has 2 guarantees: (1) the independence & viability of the central gov, & (2) the perpetualism of the constituent gov's independently. Historically this situation leads to conflicts between the 2 parts of the gov. The pol'al party may be a source of harmony between these factions, but most often it is not. If one homogeneous pol'al party controlled both gov's, central & constituent, there would be no occasion for conflict. If one party controlled constituent gov & another controlled the central, there would be a large possibility for conflict. Existing federalisms lie between these extremes & one could conceivably arrange them along a scale. This can be done by applying a power index to individuals, parties, & governing bodies. The power index, derived from decision theory, is based on the ratio of number of sequences in which the decision `pivots' on a given individual, divided by the number of sequences. An index expressing the degree of disharmony between the 2 sets of gov's was applied to the US between 1937-1956. About 50% of the time in the last 50 yrs, US federalism has experienced serious amounts of disharmony. There are 3 limitations to this type of index: (a) it measures unhomogeneous units. (b) In the state taken together, all the power of all the members is counted, whether the party is in control of the state gov or not. (c) The index of disharmony is based on the power index which tries to over-simplify the element of power in gov'al proceedings. To ascertain the extent to which these limitations interfere with the interpretive value, the index was measured against disharmony. The latter was defined by the number of cases in the Supreme Court in which the US & a state were involved. A signif +r was found. The indexes were applied to the gov's of Australia & Canada over a period of yrs & indicated extreme fluctuations in federal disharmony, & much more disharmony than in the US. In comparing these 3 federal systems, it is suggested that increases in amount of disharmony may be a function of the number of pol'al parties, number of states (the fewer, the more disharmony) whether or not it is a parliamentary rather than a presidential system. The latter has greater chance of having state & national elections at the same time, making for more federal harmony. F. Koenig.