Although in the U.S. marijuana remains illegal under federal law, a number of states have legalized marijuana in some fashion. Sam Kamin, author of “The Battle of the Bulge: The Surprising Last Stand Against State Marijuana Legalization,” agreed to answer several questions from John Dinan, editor of Publius: The Journal of Federalism
, about recent developments in this area and the future of marijuana law reform in the U.S.
The post Marijuana legalization in the American states: recent developments and prospects appeared first on OUPblog.
By John Kincaid
When Elinor Ostrom visited Lafayette College in 2010, the number of my non-political science colleagues who announced familiarity with her work astonished me. Anthropologists, biologists, economists, engineers, environmentalists, historians, philosophers, sociologists, and others flocked to see her.
Elinor’s work cut across disciplines and fields of governance because she deftly employed and developed interrelated concepts having applications in multiple settings. A key foundation of these concepts is federalism—an idea central also to the work of her mentor and husband, Vincent Ostrom.
Vincent understood federalism to be a covenantal relationship that establishes unity for collective action while preserving diversity for local self-governance by constitutionally uniting separate political communities into a limited but encompassing political community. Power is divided and shared between concurrent jurisdictions—a general government having certain nationwide duties and multiple constituent governments having broad local responsibilities. These jurisdictions both cooperate and compete. The arrangement is non-hierarchical and animated by multiple centers of power, which, often competing, exhibit flexibility and responsiveness.
From this foundation, one can understand why the Ostroms embraced the concept of polycentricity advanced in Michael Polanyi’s The Logic of Liberty (1951), namely, a political or social system consisting of many decision-making centers possessing autonomous, but limited, powers that operate within an encompassing framework of constitutional rules.
This general principle can be applied to the global arena where, like true federalists, the Ostroms rejected the need for a single global institution to solve collective action problems such as environmental protection and common-pool resource management. They advocated polycentric arrangements that enable local actors to make important decisions as close to the affected situation as possible. Hence, the Ostroms also anticipated the revival of the notion of subsidiarity in European federal theory.
But polycentricity also applies to small arenas, such as irrigation districts and metropolitan areas. Elinor and Vincent worked on water governance early in their careers, and both argued that metropolitan areas are best organized polycentrically because urban services have different economies of scale, large bureaucracies have inherent pathologies, and citizens are often crucial in co-producing public services, especially policing (the subject of empirical studies by Elinor and colleagues).
The Ostroms valued largely self-organizing social systems that border on but do not topple into sheer anarchy. Anarchy is a great bugaboo of centralists, who de-value the capacity of citizens to organize for self-governance. Without expert instructions from above, citizens are headless chickens. But this centralist notion exposes citizens to the depredations of vanguard parties and budget-maximizing bureaucrats.
This is why Vincent placed Hamilton’s famous statement in Federalist No. 1 at the heart of his work, namely, “whether societies of men are really capable or not, of establishing good government from reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force.” The Ostroms expressed abiding confidence in the ability of citizens to organize for self-governance in multi-sized arenas if given opportunities to reflect on their common dilemmas, make reasoned constitutional choices, and acquire resources to follow through with joint action.
Making such arrangements work also requires what Vincent especially emphasized as covenantal values, such as open communication, mutual trust, and reciprocity among the covenanted partners. Thus, polycentric governance, like federal governance, requires both good institutions and healthy processes.
As such, the Ostroms also placed great value on Alexis de Tocqueville’s notion of self-interest rightly understood. Indeed, it is the process of self-organizing and engaging one’s fellow citizens that helps participants to understand their self-interest rightly so as to act in collectively beneficial ways without central dictates.
Consequently, another major contribution of the Ostroms was to point out that governance choices are not limited to potentially gargantuan government regulation or potentially selfish privatization. There is a third way grounded in federalism.
John Kincaid is the Robert B. and Helen S. Meyner Professor of Government and Public Service at Lafayette College and Director of the Meyner Center for the Study of State and Local Government. He served as Associate Editor and Editor of Publius: The Journal of Federalism, and has written and lectured extensively on federalism and state and local government.
More on the applications and reflections on the work of Elinor and Vincent Ostrom can be found in this recently released special issue from Publius: The Journal of Federalism. An addition to this, Publius has also just released a free virtual collection of the most influential articles written by the Ostroms and published in Publiues over the past 23 years.
Publius: The Journal of Federalism is the world’s leading journal devoted to federalism. It is required reading for scholars of many disciplines who want the latest developments, trends, and empirical and theoretical work on federalism and intergovernmental relations.
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The post Elinor and Vincent Ostrom: federalists for all seasons appeared first on OUPblog.
By Corey Robin
Ron Paul has two problems. One is his and the larger conservative movement of which he is a part. The other is ours—by which I mean a left that is committed to both economic democracy and anti-imperialism.
Ron Paul’s problem is not merely the racist newsletters, the close ties with Lew Rockwell, his views on abortion, or even his stance on the 1964 Civil Rights Act—though these automatically disqualify him from my support. His real problem is his fundamentalist commitment to federalism, which would make any notion of human progress in this country impossible.
Federalism has a long and problematic history in this country—it lies at the core of the maintenance of slavery and white supremacy; it was consistently invoked as the basis for opposition to the welfare state; it has been, contrary to many of its defenders, one of the cornerstones of some of the most repressive moments in our nation’s history[pdf]—and though liberals used to be clear about its regressive tendencies, they’ve grown soft on it in recent years. As the liberal Yale constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar put it not so long ago:
Once again, populism and federalism—liberty and localism—work together; We the People conquer government power by dividing it between the two rival governments, state and federal.
As I’ve argued repeatedly on this blog and elsewhere, the path forward for the left lies in the alliance between active social movements on the ground and a strong national state. There is simply no other way, at least not that I am aware of, to break the back of the private autocracies that oppress us all.
Even people, no, especially people who focus on Paul’s position on the drug war should think about the perils of his federalism. There are 2 million people in prison in this country. At most 10 percent of them are in federal prisons; the rest are in state and local prisons. If Paul ended the drug war, maybe 1/2 of those in federal prison would be released. Definitely a step, but it has to be weighed against his radical embrace of whatever it is that states and local governments do.
Paul is a distinctively American type of libertarian: one that doesn’t have a critique of the state so much as a critique of the federal government. That’s a very different kettle of fish. I think libertarianism is problematic enough—in that it ignores the whole realm of social domination (or thinks that realm is entirely dependent upon or a function of the existence of the state or thinks that it can be remedied by the persuasive and individual actions of a few good soul
