Chapter Four: Administration in the Federal System: Intergovernmental Relations and Constitutional Sources of Values

Key Words:

1. Block Grants: Grants from higher-level governments to lower-level governments that are distributed on the basis of a statutory formula. They may be used in various ways within a broad policy area, with considerable discretion left to the recipient governments.
2. Categorical Grants: Grants-in-aid that are limited to specific and narrowly defined activities- for example, creating small green spaces, or “parklets,” in an urban development project area.
3. Confederal System: A system of organizing government whereby power and authority resides in subnational or state governments that collectively establish an overarching government to which they delegate some powers while retaining veto power over the national entity.
4. Cooperative Federalism: An era of U.S. federalism from the 1930s to the 1950s that emphasized national, state, and local governments as cooperating agents who interacted with each other to jointly face and solve common problems.
5. Creative Federalism: An era of U.S. federalism in the 1960s characterized by joint planning and decision making at all levels of government, including partnerships with businesses and nonprofit social organizations.
6. Devolution: The transfer of power from a central authority to a local government.
7. Dual Federalism: An era in which each level of government was viewed as supreme within its areas of responsibilities, with relatively distinctive functional divisions of authority and independent operations by bureaucratic agencies. Limited intergovernmental funding.
8. Entitlement: A government benefit required by law provided to eligible individuals, groups, or other governments, such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security retirement benefits.
9. Externalities: The costs or benefits from one thing affecting another or those not accounted for in free-market exchanges; those costs or benefits then accrue to someone other than the buyer or seller.

10.  Federalism: A system of government in which an overarching national government shares power with subnational governments.

11.  Formula Grants: A type of grant-in-aid in which a higher level of government (national or state) provides funds to a lower level for stipulated purposes and distributes them according to a set formula that treats all applicants uniformly.

12.  Horizontal Federalism: Concerns the relationships among governmental units at the same level: state-to-state, country-to-country, and city-to-city.

13.  Intergovernmental Relations: Acomplex set of interrelationships among federal, state, and local governments that involve political, fiscal, programmatic, and administrative progresses in which higher-level governments share revenues with lower-level governments, with special conditions attached that the lower-level units must meet to receive in the financial aid.

14.  Laissez-faire: A term for the economic principle that government should “let the people do as they chose” or generally keep its hands off regulating the private sectors’ economic life.

15.  Mandating:  higher level of government obligating a lower level to offer or provide some good or programs as a matter of law or as a prerequisite to full or partial funding for either that program or some other, related programs.

16.  New Federalism: An era of federalism from 1968 to1980, attributed by president Richard Nixon, that returned more autonomy to the states and emphasized blocked grants rather than project or categorical grants.

17.  Project Grants: A type of grant-in-aid given from a higher to a lower level of government that must be applied for, with an individual project as its focus. Many strings are attached. Project grants are more numerous that formula grants, generally offer fewer funds, and often require matching funds from the recipient government.

18.  Renewed Federalism: An era of federalism in the 1980s promoted by president Ronald Reagan that emphasized economic capitalism; individual rights; limited government; rationality in government decision making by assessing costs and benefits of federal programs, especially regulatory ones, and devolved authority and funding down to the state and local levels.

19.  Substate regionalism: A multijurisdictional cooperative arrangement between or among local government entities, such as metropolitan special districts or councils of government that provides a regionwide view or approach to a local problem. Most often used for planning, developing, transportation, and environmental policy problem that affects a whole region.

20.  Unfunded Mandates: federal or state laws that impose on lower-level governments a program that requires expenditures but no implementing funds.

21.  Unitary System: : A form of government in which authority is centralized but some responsibilities may be delegated to smaller administrative units; in doing so, the upper level freely grants authority but may limit or even rescind it without the consent of the lower level. Each state within the United States is a unitary system with respect to its local government.

22.  Vertical federalism: The upper-lower relationships between governments at different levels: national-to-state, state-to-local, and national-to-local.

23.  Vertical Functional Autocracies: Largely self-governing professional guilds of members of bureaucracies at the federal, state, or local levels who are able to function as autocracies, running a policy area as a functional fiefdom mostly independent of other agencies or branches of government. Associated with the picket-fence model of federalism.