Towards a Disjointed-Decision Trap? Lessons from a Fragmented US-Federal Democracy

Federalism in the United States has served as a classic model of dual federalism with its strict separation of powers between levels of government and comparatively far-reaching scope of state-level autonomy. However, the US once also gave rise to the concept of cooperative federalism. Further concepts framed on the US case include ‘picket-fence’ and ‘coercive federalism’, and in recent years increasingly ‘fragmented federalism’. These concepts refer not only to various aspects of relations between federal or national and state levels. They also suggest, taken together, an overarching ambivalence in the character of US federalism over time. Unlike many other modern federal systems, the US widely lacks constitutional institutional linkages between the states and the national government, and an analogous dearth in the prescription of joint or common tasks. Those linkages and relationships established among states and intergovernmental relations are fragile, and meanwhile appear conducive to increasing tensions and frictions, not least under conditions of political polarization. At the same time, the US presidential system represents a veritable prototype of strict separation of powers with checks and balances between branches of government. Moreover, there has also been intensifying polarization and ‘divided government’ between the branches at federal level, as witnessed in multiple recent presidential administrations. Yet, in addition to the constitutional default settings of separated institutions, there is much reason to deem the challenges of divided government as lying deeper than party polarization and rising populism. Against this backdrop, the paper sets out to re-assess several strands of constitutional-political antecedent development that has led to the current state of the union in the US. Drawing on comparative democratic government and comparative federalism research, the paper seeks to capture how both the separation-of-powers in federal and democratic governmental dimensions contribute to an intensifying dilemma of US federal democracy: one that has evolved into a peculiar combination of a counter-majoritarian multiplicity of separated institutions but with simple (relative) majoritarianism in the branches and levels of government. Drawing on the joint-decision trap Scharpf (1988) famously conceived for explaining potentials for deadlock or sub-optimal decisions in systems requiring co-decision of constituent-unit governments at (supra-)national level, this paper aims to conceptualize the inverse: a disjointed-decision making system and its respective traps. Building on this framework, the paper shows how federal and state governments’ ability to conduct coordination and resolve cross-jurisdictional problems together may be hampered under such decoupled, fragmented institutional conditions, particularly in conjunction with political populism, polarization, and intensified bipolar partisan antagonism. Finally, I seek to draw potential lessons from the case of US federal democracy with a particular view to the potentials this disjointed model provides for safeguarding democracy and rule of law as well as for further comparison.