ABSTRACT
Most analyses of US federalism, for good reason, assume a top-down rather than a bottom-up, or citizen-level, perspective. By this, I mean that they concentrate more on the macro-level issues of federalism than on the microlevel implications for citizens and politicians who operate within them. The core of the federalism literature consists primarily of institutional design questions that lend themselves to macro-perspectives: e.g., what are the different types of federal arrangements, and are they more or less advantageous for certain tasks than unitary designs?
