State Government: Organization

 

As the political economy is currently constituted, the wide disparity among states in terms of size, population, and resources implies that for any decentralization scheme based on economies of scale, decentralization from federal government to the state governments would vary from state to state. A simpler decentralization system would require that the states be reorganized in such a way as to promote a uniform decentralization.

To determine the appropriate size of the reorganized  states, the economies of scale in business as well as government must be considered, since complying with the greater variation in state laws resulting from decentralization would mean higher costs for producers due to some loss of economies of scale, although these costs would in time decline with the growing flexibility made possible by automation. To avoid this greater variation altogether, however, would be to incur the cost of foregone empirical learning about how to continually create a better political economy.

Achieving a compromise between these costs means that states must be made large enough to comprise a market with economies of scale and at the same time must have economies of scale in operations of government. In order to meet these requirements, each state should be large enough have at least one research university and a sufficiently large professional talent pool that would enable the state to form its own opinions about risk management. Bearing these stipulations, this book proceeds on the assumption that the various states should contain a population between 5 and 20 million people. Given our current arrangement of states, then, several of the less populated states would have to be combined into larger units.

The method proposed here for maintaining the states with sufficient resources and size in an environment of constantly changing patterns of technology and state growth is to redraw state boundaries each decade Since congressmen would be interested primarily in redistricting that would maximize their reelection chances, the nationally elected representatives, the senators would draw up three alternative plans to be submitted to the voters for choice. These alternatives would have to be approved by the President and could be subjected to a professional review before being submitted to the voters. The criterion for redistricting should be cluster analysis, a statistical technique used to group entities with similar attributes, to create states with internally homogeneous interests. Thus organized, states would promote homogeneous interests in such a way as to satisfy the general benefits criterion of the professional review.

A consequence of reorganizing the states every decade would be a greater difference in the political economy of the states than currently. Reorganization each decade to create states with internally homogeneous economic interests would imply greater heterogeneity among states. Also, with increasing freedom of location of individuals, differences in political philosophy would also be accentuated. For example, the states have the right to file for experimental variances on the rulings of the Supreme Court. Consequently, states with a liberal majority would file for the liberal minority precedent when the court majority was conservative and conservative states would take similar action when the majority of the Supreme Court was liberal. Thus with freedom of location states would tend to attract individuals and households with similar views.

These heterogeneous political economies would evolve different arrangements for state government. This is because given the principle of decentralization, the task of organizing state government would fall to the individual states. Some would maintain the more traditional two-house legislature while others might modify the legislature to parallel the proposed federal legislature. Similarly, the manner in which states implemented the concept of a professional review of government would vary considerably. As the state governments would be assuming many operational considerations from the federal government, they would be delegating many government responsibilities to the next level of government, the metropolitan governments.

Nevertheless, a common theme among the state governments would be the development of more technical capability in order to perform in their expanded roles. This means that all states would move to full-time legislatures with professional salaries such as California and New York currently have, and all states would have to upgrade the quality of their professional staffs in the state bureaucracies. Such a move would be a projection of current trends.