Do Citizens really care about federalism? public preferences for the administration of governmental programs

Abstract

In this paper we present a secondary analysis of a survey of Alabama residents. The focus of that survey was individual attitudes toward a variety of policy areas, five of which could reasonably be administered at either the state or national level. Rather than simply asking what level of government should have responsibility, we asked respondents to construct national and state budgets which might, or might not, include appropriations for these and other policy areas. In general, individuals allocated funds to each policy area at both the state and national level. This means either that most citizens favor cooperative federalism, or more likely, people are primarily interested in seeing that certain programs are funded and do not much care what level of government administers a policy area. This latter interpretation is supported by the fact that no theory taken from the current fed-eralism literature is able to explain individual attitudes toward federalism as measured by these budget allocations. Most people simply do not have very strong feelings about which level of government should be responsible for any given program.