final paper

US Electoral System and its Applicability on Intergovernmental Relations

Intergovernmental relations in the United States are essential in promoting co-operative decision-making, coordinating budgets and priorities across different sectors, and ensuring execution of policies. This helps in preventing disputes and conflicts between the different levels of government. This cooperative interrelationship involves the federal, state, and local governments. The governmental structure of the US has become pervasive in recent years every level of government virtually involved in every level of activity from simple activities such as tax offsets, shared revenues, and grants-in-aid (Kincaid & Stenberg, 2011). How does the electoral system fit in all this?

It is important to highlight that the Constitution does not contain general, and explicit provisions on terms of intergovernmental cooperation. This is significant in the electoral system (Trench, 2006). It is important to understand the interacting factors between state and local governments especially in regions where local governments wield a lot of resources such as major cities i.e. Chicago, and New York. At the national level, selection of president electors is on the voluntary cooperation of states (Trench, 2006). There are no constitutional mechanisms that compel individual states in electing members of the Congress. Senators are keen in addressing federal matters such as foreign relations. However, as per the Seventeenth Amendment to the U.S constitution, the State executive authorities are in-charge of issuing writs of election. The state legislature also has the power to empower the State Executive to make temporary appointments to the constitution until an election is held in case of a vacancy (Shanton, 2019). The elections in the United States are highly decentralized. Intergovernmental relations are evident from the distribution of election administration duties at state and local levels (Shanton, 2019). The federal government has to understand how the working of state and local election systems operate and how this systems affect its administration. There is a paucity of studies showing the synergy between the intergovernmental relations and electoral systems. It is important that more research and study is done in this field to inform on how better relations could be forged by synchronizing the two.

References

Kincaid, J., & Stenberg, C. W. (2011). “Big questions” about intergovernmental relations and management: Who will address them?. Public Administration Review, 71(2), 196-202.

Shanton, K. L. (2019). The state and local role in election administration: Duties and structures. Congressional Research Service.

Trench, A. (2006). Intergovernmental relations: in search of a theory. In Territory, democracy and justice (pp. 224-256). Palgrave Macmillan, London.