State and Local Governments Analysis Essay

State and local governments cooperate in various services sharing common responsibilities. The functions, which state and local governments exercise, affect directly Americans’ everyday life. They range from arranging elections for citizens to paying for roads, providing water, organizing police and fire services, establishing zoning regulations and licensing professionals. In addition, state and local government establish limits on property taxes and develop different forms of job training for welfare recipients.

These functions are equally important but, to my mind, there is one function that is even more significant. This is responsibility of controlling educational sector. In the 1990s many state and local governments in the United States organized charter schools which gave citizens an opportunity to start alternative schools that are publicly funded. Other governments established voucher systems that permitted parents to make use of a state-issued voucher to send their children to public schools. I believe the state and local governments’ initiatives in the field of education are of extreme importance as the quality of education citizens get at present affect the overall development of the country in future.

Though the debate over limiting legislative terms dates back to the beginnings of political science, in the United States the problem of term limits for state and nationally elected officials has been treated seriously since the late 1980s – the early 90s. There are both advantages and disadvantages of imposing term limits on officials.

The advantages of term limits include:

• They reduce the concentration and abuse of power;
• They encourage political participation by nonpoliticians;
• They make government more responsive to public needs;
• They make politicians think more of the voters’ interests instead of the polices that will ensure their long-term political survival;
• They ensure that officials have equal seniority and, as a result, equal power and influence.

The disadvantages of terms limits are:

• They take away the right of voters to re-elect their representative or to vote someone out of the office;
• Newly elected officials lack the experience that the officials who spent years in office have;
• Officials approaching their term limits think of their own political future instead of the voters’ interests;
• Term limits lead to frequent trading of posts between the same people and not to new faces that enter politics.

Historically, state constitutions in the USA were changed by means of the four different methods:

• Extra-legal means such as the Dorr Rebellion in Rhode Island during 1841-1842.
• Initiative. This is the process whereby constitutional changes are proposed and placed on the ballot by a citizen’s petition and then enacted by popular vote. There are two types of initiatives: direct and indirect. Direct initiatives are submitted directly to the voters without any action by the legislature whereas indirect initiatives are proposed by a citizen’s petition but sent to legislature before submitting directly to the voters.
• Referendum. This is the process when constitutional changes are passed by the legislature and then referred to voters for final approval. There exist referenda of two types: the popular referenda and the propositions submitted by the legislature. They differ in the citizen’s petition that is present in the first case and is absent in the second one. Contrary to the popular referendum in the proposition submitted by the legislature a proposed constitutional amendment or statute is submitted to voters without being prompted by a citizen’s petition. Up to 1898 this was the only kind of initiative or referendum used in the USA. In 1898 the South Dakota became the first state to allow direct statewide initiatives.
• The use of commissions or other administrative bodies as sources of constitutional change. Appeared at the mid of the twentieth century as a product of renegade legislatures that strived to revise outmoded state constitutions with a minimum of popular debate. The two main purposes that commissions serve up to the present day are: to study the constitution and propose changes and to prepare for a constitutional convention.

Currently, constitutional change by legislative proposal and popular ratification remains the norm for most states (Leonarde, 1996). There exist three basic ways in which the national government influences state level politics:

• General state jurisdiction. The national government can influence state government through encroaching on the domain of territory that traditionally has belonged to the states. There are two prominent means of this encroachment: preemption and grants-in-aid programs. Preemption implies expand of the national government’s powers by limiting the scope of authority previously exercised by the state governments. Grants-in-aid programs are worked out with the two purposes: to assist in the achievement of state purposes and to assert the primacy of national aims and purposes. The use of block grants and categorical grants are the common examples of how these purposes are achieved by the national government.
• State policy priorities. They serve an important arena through which the national government can assert its purposes. There are two possible models through which the national government operates in states’ policy matters: the bargaining model and the alternative hierarchical one. According to bargaining model, the national government can influence state policy matters of modest or marginal significance, whereas the hierarchical model offers that the national government exercises significant influence on the determination of substantive state policies.
• Agency resource allocations. The national government affects the allocation of resources by and to specific state agencies. This is the influence of the national government in a micro-level context, the most narrowly focused arena of the national government’s intrusion in state affairs.

The first arena is the most broadly focused one and the second one occupies an intermediate position (Yoo & Wright, 1993, p. 53). Thus, the national government works at different levels to exert one’s purposes. Voter turnout is the percentage of eligible voters who participate in elections. Different countries have different statistics on average voter turnouts. This happens due to the combination of factors that affect voter turnout:

• Socio-economic factors: education, income, ethnicity and age affect voters’ participation in elections. If a person is educated the possibility that he or she will vote increases. Wealthier people are more likely to vote. Since representatives of different ethnic groups have different levels of education and income, the percentage of eligible voters who participate in elections varies in different ethnicities. Elderly people are more willing to vote than the young who claim that they simply do not have time for voting. Married people are more likely to participate in elections than single ones.
• Genetic factors: voting appears to be habitual. If a young voter’s parents are/were active during elections he or she is more likely to vote as well. The two genes responsible for social behavior and political activity in particular are monoamine oxidase and 5HTT.
• Regional factor: time zones affect voters’ participation. In continent spanning nations voters of some regions are aware of the results from other regions and, therefore, do not find it necessary to vote as they believe their participation will not change the situation.
• Cultural factor: the level to which the cultural habit of voting is developed influences voters’ participation in elections. Sense of civic duty that the makes people vote is developed throughout a certain period of time and under certain social conditions. The cultural habit to vote is formed out of the attitudes like trust in government, degree of devotion among the population, interest in politics and belief in the effectiveness of voting.
• Institutional factors: the modalities of how voter legislation is conducted; compulsory or non-compulsory character of voting; proportional representation system; ease of voting; voter fatigue and measuring turnout – all of them affect the reported level of average voter turnout.

Weather, time of the year and the day of the week also affect voter turnout. Midweek elections during the spring or autumn increases voters’ participation if compared to elections held weekend and summer. Still, these factors can cause an increase or decrease in turnout up to five percentage points only.

Since the 1960s, there is a trend of decreasing voter turnout in most established democracies in the world. The US show one of the lowest levels of voter turnout as compared to other democracies. The country is 20^th out of 21 in voter turnout among established democracies – only Switzerland has lower voter turnout than turnout in U.S. presidential elections. Turnout among potentially eligible voters in the U.S. in presidential elections is only 50-55%. Turnout in non-presidential years is far lower (Voter turnout). An analyst Curtis Gans claims that America being “the nation that prides itself on being the best example of government of, for, and by the people is rapidly becoming a nation whose participation is limited to the interested or zealous few.” (Gans, 2000, p. 34)

Critics trace the decline in voter turnout as the result of the baleful influence of “big money” on voters. The large sums raised and spent by competing parties and their campaigns alienate voters and discourage their participation. The widely-spread opinion among the voters is that there is no necessity to vote as campaign contributors run the show. Other possible cause of decline in the level of voter turnout in the USA is that sharply critical advertising (so-called negative ads) discourages voting by fostering cynicism about the political process. Big money and negative ads are the most obvious signs of sickness in the body of politics and low voter turnout in the country is the consequence of the disease. Limits on political liberty through restrictions on campaign finance and on political advertising are expected to save the patient and increase voter turnout in the USA (Samples, 2004, p. 2).

Electrical machinery and computers are among the leading manufactures of North Carolina. Apart from ordinary usage, computers have been gradually used in the state as tools for making Internet voting possible. In the 2000 elections, the state participated in a proof-of-concept demonstration of Internet voting. At the current stage Internet voting research persists as it is of primary importance to find out how secure Internet voting is to decide whether to permit it or not in the state. My position is that until this system of voting does not offer any guarantees of secure voting it should not be implemented in the state.

The thing is that according to the research of the Internet Policy Institute, remote Internet voting systems pose significant risk to the integrity of the voting process and “should not be fielded for use in public elections until substantial technical and social science issues are addressed.” (Schwartz) Technical issues imply the problem of security, as there are many opportunities for hackers to hack the whole system and to influence the election results. As North Carolina is a state where young population prevails and hackers are mostly young people the chances that the system can easily be hacked increase. Interested parties and opposing candidates if resort to services of these hackers, not to mention terrorists who often themselves are rather educated in computer science, the very principle of fair and democratic elections will be neglected.

Another problem that might appear if implementing the Internet voting system in the state is that due to the income differences not every voter in North Carolina has Internet access. The principle of fairness does not work in case of Internet voting, as the actual possibility of voting is restricted to Internet access of the voter.

It would seem that the use of voting machines in traditional polling places is the best solution to the problem but it appears that the leading voting machines manufacturers of the state do not give any guarantees of their products’ security. The proprietary codes that electronic voting companies develop can leak over the Internet. Moreover, there are no effective threats to the dangers of viruses, worms, hackers, and intruders that question the security of Internet voter system elaborated. Thus, until no public oversight of elections and their absolute security is offered no green line to Internet voting system in North Carolina should be given.

The US Constitution proclaims separation of power in the government. By establishing the principle of separation of power the Framers intended not to recreate a government with centralized power (during the US colonial period) and followed John Locke’s idea that government power must be limited so that the liberties of people cannot be easily trampled (Long) The first instance of divided government occurred in 1792 when Federalist President George Washington was reelected and Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party won a nine-seat majority in the House.

In 1984, the pattern persisted: Republican Ronald Reagan was re-elected and the opposition Democrats had a seventy-one-seat margin in the lower chamber. In 1988, Republican George Bush easily beat Democrat Michael Dukakis in the presidential election, but the Democrats increased their majority in the House to an impressive eighty-nine-seat plurality (White and Mileur, 1992, p. 36). As neither Democrats nor the Republicans can work out a national program that is compelling enough to win an outright majority the combination of their efforts become more effective in terms of state level politics.

Historically, American voters who experience the outcomes of the state level politics approve of divided party government that speaks of its effectiveness. For example, after the 1988 balloting sixty seven percent of Connecticut voters found divided party government good for the country and the 1990 survey found that 51 percent of voters considered divided government to be “a good thing, because it has kept either political party from having too much power.” Only 37 percent found it “bad because it has made it impossible to work on solutions to the important problems facing the country.” (White and Mileur, 1992, p. 37).

Divided and unified party government has both positive and negative impacts on state level politics: on the one hand, divided government makes the enactment of policy more difficult but presents a balanced view on this or that problem, on the other, unified government is more likely to pass significant public policy though the principle of “check and balance” does not work in this case.

United States state legislatures – “the first branch of government” – today have a vastly increased capacity to govern (Pound, 1999, p. 28). This capacity is disclosed through the functions that they perform:

• Propose amendments to the state constitution, consider proposed amendments to the Constitution of the United States;
• Prepare and legislate for a program derived from a variety of sources. The need of the program comes out from the study of the problems of the district and the state. The needs of the committees on which legislators serve, of their parties, friends and interest groups are also thoroughly considered before the need for new legislation is conceived;
• Perform reviews of other legislators’ proposals and programs and either support or oppose them;
• Oversee the work of the administrative branch of the government;
• Attend committee hearings, review reports and investigate complaints to monitor the annual state budget;
• Serve a link between the district, state and federal agencies, handling the constituents’ problems through personal assistance;
• Attend and participate in party caucuses, meetings on specific problems and general conventions thus playing an active role in the work of the political party.

The professionalism with which these functions are performed by state legislators results in either increase or loss of the public confidence in representative institutions. There exist two approaches to characterize representatives of legislature. The first one offers the fall of legislatures into four groups: “professionalized”, transitional, traditional and those with term limits (Pound, 1999, p. 28).

According to the second existing approach legislatures fall into three groups: professional, citizen or a hybrid of the two (Penchoff, 2007, p. 11). Though the two approaches slightly differ in the titles proposed for each legislature type and in characteristic traits that define each of the type, both of them state that “professional” or “professionalized” legislature has certain advantages over the other legislature type. Namely, these are higher compensation, unlimited time in session, large professional staffs and members who define their occupation as legislator (Pound, 1999, p. 28).

This professional legislature type includes highly urbanized states with large populations: California, New York, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin and New Jersey. The type of legislative body is one of the leading factors that affect legislative compensation. Professional legislatures are the highest paid. For example, legislators in California are the highest paid in the 50 state capitols with annual salaries of $110,880. In general, by 2005, the average salary in professional legislatures was $67,077.22. That’s a 5.13 percent increase for the above-mentioned states since 1975 (Penchoff, 2007, p. 11).

Moreover, as term limits become more widely implemented throughout the states the advantage of unlimited time in session remains very important. The percentage of professional legislators has increased from 3 percent in 1976 to 11 percent in 1986 and to 14 percent in 1995. Though the advantages that this legislature type has are sometimes crucial for the choices in favor of professional legislature that politicians make, one should also give credit for time-consuming role that professional legislatures take in performing constituent services for the public.

A state governor has many responsibilities. First, he serves as commander-in-chief of the National Guard during peaceful times or when there is no case of emergency. This responsibility has been established historically. Prior to the World War II the Guard was available on call of the state governor to handle various disturbances that occurred.

The governor has the right to submit a comprehensive executive budget and messages to the legislature; therefore, he is in a position to influence the legislature and public serving a leader of policy. In addition, the governor has much power in policy innovation. He can call on any of the state agencies for ideas and data and the state cannot refuse to give him the information he requests.

Further, governor is the head of his political party. Therefore, he has to spend a great deal of time attending party activities. Smoothing over contradictions that emerge between rival factions within the organization or rival members of the legislature is one among the governor’s responsibilities in terms of the political party that he is in charge of.

The governor is also responsible for appropriate actions in case of emergency. The governor’s duty is to make plans for the case of emergency in collaboration with other officials. Emergencies include natural disasters, prison breaks, race riots, and political crises of various sorts.

Other responsibilities of the governor include making basic changes in existing public policy, new state programs, and major alterations in the tax structure. The governor’s task is to find the most suitable decision for this or that problem that occurs. He is to seek a wide range of opinions on the subject. When various approaches to the problems are carefully thought over the governor makes the final decision. The results that the decision will bring will determine the political fate of the governor and of his party or faction. Regarding this, the governor cannot afford to be often wrong.

References

Gans, C. (2000). Table for One, Please: America’s Disintegrating Democracy. Washington Monthly, 20, 33-35.

Lavery, K. (1999). Smart Contracting for Local Government Services: Processes and Experience. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers.

Leonarde, A. R. (1996). In search of the deliberate initiative. A proposal for a new method of constitutional change. 2008. Web.

Long, J. P. (1997). Divided government: Change, uncertainty, and the constitutional order. 2008. Web.

Penchoff, J. (2007). Legislative pay daze. Web.

Pound, W. T. (1999). The Modern Legislature. State Legislatures, 25, 28.

Samples, J. (2004). Three Myths about Voter Turnout in the United States, Policy analysis, 524, 1-12.

Schwartz, J. (2004). Report says Internet voting system is too insecure to use. 2008. Web.

Switzer, J. V. (2001). Local Government Implementation of the Americans with Disabilities Act: Factors Affecting Statutory Compliance. Policy Studies Journal, 29(4), 654.

Vile, M. J. (1999). Politics in the USA. London: Routledge.

Yoo, J.-W. & Wright, D. S. (1993). Public policy and intergovernmental relations: Measuring perceived change(s) in national influence – the effects of the federalism decade. Policy Studies Journal, 21, 53-55.

White, J. K. & Mileur, J. M. (Eds.). (1992). Challenges to party government. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.