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The 18th-century political philosopher Montesquieu wrote that governments are likely to be tyrannical if they are responsible for administering large territories, for they must develop the organizational capacity characteristic of despotic states. It was partly this fear that led the American founding fathers to provide for a federal system and to divide governmental functions between the government in Washington and the state governments. Modern technology and mass communication are often said to have deprived Montesquieu’s axiom of its force. Yet the technology that makes it possible for large areas to be governed democratically also holds out the spectre of an even greater tyranny than Montesquieu foresaw.
In all political systems the relationships between national and regional or state governments have been affected by technology and new means of communication. In the 18th century Thomas Jefferson—in arguing that local government, or the government closest to the people, was best—could claim that citizens knew most about their local governments, somewhat less about their state governments, and least about the national government. In the present-day United States, however, the concentration of the mass media on the issues and personalities of national government has made nonsense of this proposition. As several studies have demonstrated, people know much less about local government than national government and turn out to vote in much larger numbers in national elections. The necessity for employing systems for the devolution of political power is reduced when a central government can communicate directly with citizens in all parts of the national territory, and the vitality of subnational levels of government is sapped when public attention is focussed on national problems.
Another general development that has lessened the importance of regional or state government is the rise of efficient national bureaucracies. In nearly all political systems, there has been some tendency toward bureaucratic centralization, and in some cases national bureaucracies have almost completely replaced older systems of regional and provincial administration. In the United States, for example, complex programs of social security, income taxes, agricultural subsidies, and many others that bear directly on individuals are centrally administered.
Even in systems in which a division of functions between national and subnational governments is constitutionally prescribed, the prevailing trend in intergovernmental relations is toward increasing involvement of the national government in areas once dominated by regional or state governments. Thus, the original constitutional arrangements prescribed by the Allied powers for the West German republic in 1949 won general acclaim at the time because they provided for greater decentralization than had the Weimar Constitution; but, as soon as Germany was free to amend its own constitution, several state functions were reassigned to the national government. In the United States, also, the collapse of the doctrine of “dual federalism,” according to which the powers of the national government were restricted by the powers reserved to the states, signalled the end of an era in which the states could claim exclusive jurisdiction over a wide range of functions. Today, forms of cooperative federalism involving joint action by national and state governments are increasingly common. Such cooperative relationships in the United States include programs of public assistance, the interstate highway system, agricultural extension programs, and aid to education. In some areas, such as school desegregation, the national government has used broad powers to compel states to conform to national standards.
Nevertheless, efforts made to reinvigorate regional or state governments have met with some measure of success in countries such as France, Italy, and Belgium. Moreover, popular attempts to reverse the trend toward national centralization have persisted in regions with historically strong nationalist or separatist movements—for example, in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Quebec, and Brittany.
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