States cp ddi 2012
Federalism is key to democracy in multinational countries
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- Impact – Econ Centralization causes economic turmoil—common feature of developing countries Oates 99
- Federalism solves for the economy.
- Impact – Econ
Federalism is key to democracy in multinational countries.Alfred Stepan, Wallace Sayre Professor of Government, the founding Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Toleration, and Religion (CDTR), and the Co-Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life (IRCPL) at Columbia University, ’99, Journal of Democracy, Vol. 10, No. 4 Yet in spite of these potential problems, federal rather than unitary states are the¶ form most often associated with multinational democracies. Federal states are¶ also associated with large populations, extensive territories, and democracies¶ with territorially based linguistic fragmentation. In fact, every single¶ longstanding democracy in a territorially based multilingual and multinational¶ polity is a federal state.¶ Although there are many multinational polities in the world, few of them are¶ democracies. Those multinational democracies that do exist, however¶ (Switzerland, Canada, Belgium, Spain, and India), are all federal. Although all¶ these democracies, except for Switzerland, have had problems managing their¶ multinational polities (and even Switzerland had the Sonderbund War, the¶ secession of the Catholic cantons in 1848), they remain reasonably stable. By¶ contrast, Sri Lanka, a territorially based multilingual and multinational unitary¶ state that feared the "slippery slope" of federalism, could not cope with its ethnic¶ divisions and plunged headlong into a bloody civil war that has lasted more than¶ 15 years. Impact – Econ Centralization causes economic turmoil—common feature of developing countries Oates 99 [William E. Oates, September 1999, “An Essay on Fiscal Federalism”, Journal of Economic Literature, JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2564874] aw When examining international cross- sectional data on intergovernmental structure, one is immediately struck by the sharp contrast in the extent of fiscal decentralization in the industrialized and developing countries. In a study of my own involving a group of forty-three countries (Oates 1985), the sample sta- tistics revealed an average share of cen- tral-government spending in total pub- lic expenditure of 65 percent in the subsample of eighteen industrialized countries, as contrasted to 89 percent in the subsample of twenty-five develop- ing nations. In terms of total public revenues, the central-government share for this same subsample of developing countries was over 90 percent! Although there are real concerns with the accuracy of some of these fiscal data (Richard Bird 1986), the general pre- sumption that the developing countries are characterized by relatively high de- grees of fiscal centralization seems firmly grounded. And this, moreover, is not something new. Writing over forty years ago, Alison Martin and W. Arthur Lewis (1956) noted that "the weakness of local government in relation to cen- tral government is one of the most strik- ing phenomena of under-developed countries" (p. 231). What are we to make of this? Some observers attribute the poor economic performance of many of the developing countries in large measure to the failure of central planning and make a strong case for the devolution of fiscal respon- sibilities. But the issue is clearly more complicated than this. In particular, the question arises as to whether fiscal de- centralization is a cause or a result of economic development. Roy Bahl and Johannes Linn (1992), for example, ar- gue that as economies grow and mature, economic gains from fiscal decentraliza- tion emerge. As they put it, "Decen- tralization more likely comes with the achievement of a higher stage of eco- nomic development" (p. 391); the "threshold level of economic develop- ment" at which fiscal decentralization becomes attractive "appears to be quite high" (p. 393). From this perspective, it is economic development that comes first; fiscal decentralization then fol- lows. But not all would agree. More generally, it seems to me, we must re- gard intergovernmental structure as part of a larger political and economic system that both influences and is de- termined by the interplay of a variety of political and economic forces. It may well be that fiscal decentralization itself has a real contribution to make to im- proved economic and political perfor- mance at different stages of development. Federalism solves for the economy. Ute Wachendorfer Schmidt, Professor of Political Scienc at the University of Heidelberg, 2k, Federalism and Political Performance, pg. 225, TB For the most case of distributive outcomes, federalist systems are uniformly relevant. As seen in Table 10.1, federalism tends to dampent unemployment and thus has a modestly redistributive effect (standardized slope stimate or beta equal to -0.088). But it also has an anti-redistributive, or regressively redistributive effect on social policy. Specifically, the federalism dummy variable has highly significant effects on both transfer effort and the social wage. Federalism is almost as consistently relevant where aggregate economic gain is more at issue. Although federalism has a negligible relation to trade balances in these simple models, it has a statistically significant, positive relation to investment rates and rates of growth in (per capita) GDP and significant, negative effects on inflation. Overall, preliminary findings indicate that federalism tends to improve macro-economic outcomes relatively tied to the operation of private markets (investment and income growth and even unemployment and inflation), but it tends to inhibit redistributive social policies. This patter is consistent with the views that (1) federalism tends to inhibit government and social economic activism, that (2) government social policy activism is progressively redistributive, but that (3) laissez-faire… (can’t find end of card). Impact – Econ Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. 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