Why federalism is hard

Chayenne Polimedio and Elena Souris list some of the major obstacles to federalism in today's political reality on Vox.

The word federalism used to make liberals raise their eyebrows in suspicion and skepticism. States’ poorly funded welfare programs, paralyzing debt, and resistance to guidance from the federal government were enough reasons to make federalism, as principle of government, something from which progressives would keep their distance.

But after the 2016 election, that changed. After eight years of expectation that the White House would set strong national policy, followed by an epic setback, liberals rushed to quote Justice Louis D. Brandeis pointing out that states are “laboratories” of democracy, where a “single courageous state” can “try novel social and economic experiments.” Federalism has quickly become a tool to challenge and resist White House executive orders and the latest congressional bills.

Indeed, federalism has no ideological alliance. Heather Gerken, dean and professor at Yale Law School and one of the country’s leading experts on constitutional law and election law, told us that “federalism has long been the darling of conservatives. But that’s a mistake because federalism is for everybody.” But while the idea of federalism seems promising, the practice of it is a lot more complicated.

Over the past year, we’ve gathered data for the Laboratories of Democracy Database, a platform for tracking how states are testing new ideas for financing campaigns, structuring voting systems, setting district boundaries, and expanding participation. From this research, states like Washington and Arizona offer an especially optimistic and promising picture of what the future of progressive federalism could look like. Via strong campaign finance laws, robust public financing for campaigns, and independent redistricting commissions, these states are experimenting with new ideas, and the appetite for expanding those ideas has ballooned to a national scale.

But the enormous size and complexity of the United States means that when it comes to reform at the state and local levels, there’s little standardization and no systematic analysis of the effects of reform. On top of that, the drama of politics means that states are always under threat of losing federal funding, are stuck having to navigate partisanship and state/city conflicts, and don’t necessarily have the resources to create easily accessible repositories of information.