Federalism, Political Energy, and Entropy

SHE PURPOSE of this essay is to suggest the outlines of a conceptual framework for analyzing the sources of political vitality within states of varying diversity and unity. It will attempt to formulate some concepts useful in accounting for the often great range of functional and/or dysfunctional conflict within systems. Federalism is a complex phenomenon and what is crucial to explain is not what makes all states the same, but what underpins the great varieties of form and effectiveness among systems. The basic assumptions about the nature of are one of the problems of political theory most in need of reassessment today. Most theories of are subject to an important distortion. They tend to treat too formally (constitutionally), in terms of component units among which the relationship is the same. Federalism is generally viewed as a one-to-one relationship between the central government and the component state (or all the component states collectively). The system is judged to be or not to be federal-as-a-whole (or more or less federal-as-a-whole) . This judgment results in an important distortion because systems are really varyingly federal from unit to unit. That is, the nature of the federal relationship between the central government and each component government considered separately can vary significantly. The quality of the federalism of any given system is an expression of the patterns of the legal, political, economic, cultural and other relations among all the essential units

Analogy · Democracy · Economic system · Economics · Epistemology · Federalism · Government (linguistics) · Law and economics · Political science · Political system · Politics · Positive economics · Sociology · Vitality · Canadian Policy and Governance · Law