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Hills, Roderick M. --- "Federalism and Public Choice" [2010] ELECD 313; in Farber, A. Daniel; O’Connell, Joseph Anne (eds), "Research Handbook on Public Choice and Public Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010)

Book Title: Research Handbook on Public Choice and Public Law

Editor(s): Farber, A. Daniel; O’Connell, Joseph Anne

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847206749

Section: Chapter 6

Section Title: Federalism and Public Choice

Author(s): Hills, Roderick M.

Number of pages: 27

Extract:

6 Federalism and public choice
Roderick M. Hills, Jr


The public choice literature on federalism and its near-relation, localism, is voluminous
in size but narrow in focus. If one includes articles on fiscal federalism and Tiebout's
spatial economies under the rubric of `public choice literature',1 then the articles in law,
political science, and public economics that refer to public choice concepts number in the
thousands.2 Most of this literature revolves around the idea of mobility between compet-
ing subnational jurisdictions. Less of the literature focuses on how political activity by
voters or politicians in federal regimes differ from unitary states' politics. The literature,
in other words, focuses on exit, not voice.3
The absence of substantial public choice scholarship on democratic behavior in federal
regimes oddly contrasts with the political tradition of federalism in the United States.
The Anti-Federalists opposed the US Constitution on the ground that only aristocratic
elites would be able to compete in large electoral districts required by a continental
nation (Cornell 1999). The Jacksonian Democrats opposed a broad construction of
Congress' power to fund infrastructure on the similar ground that wealthy `monopo-
lists' would exert disproportionate power at the metropolitan centers where the federal
government's officials would work. These `voice-based' arguments treat federalism as a
device by which to reduce slack between the agent (elected officials) and principal (the
voters), by reducing the cost to voters of monitoring the agents' actions. Public choice
theory does not have much to ...