Year: 2009
Type: book-review
Abstract: Federalism is one of the more inscrutable of the principles of the American Constitution, and is frequently subject to facile analysis in the service of ideological causes great and small.Conventional wisdom portrays the relationship between the state and national governments as a one-way, zero-sum game in which the national government steadily erodes state autonomy.Against this conventional wisdom, John Nugent's Safeguarding Federalism (2009) proposes that state officials and the organizations that defend local interests can effectively employ a variety of means at their disposal to defend their prerogatives.While the cause of state's rights has suffered a number ofhigh-profile defeats (witness the failure of southern resistance to desegregation and the proliferation of unfunded mandates, for example), Nugent persuasively argues that the states have been far more successful than conventional wisdom would suggest, and cogently describes the many subterranean pathways by which states resist, influence, and appropriate national policies to better serve their interests.Nugent's scope of analysis is deliberately narrow and practical: rather "than presenting a normative grand theory ofhow state and federal authority ought to be divided, I describe and explain the ongoing intergovernmental policy battles that are waged in a variety of arenas" (p.18).Nugent proceeds from the beliefthat states are not monolithic entities that respond universally to all federal policies.To better relate the complexity of state incentives vis-a-vis national policymaking, he creates a typology of interests that range from universalistic concerns that are articulated by the national intergovernmental lobbying groups
Source: Oklahoma politics
Author: Kenneth S. Hicks
Institution: Rogers State University
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W1518049216