ABSTRACT
The federal government has eight principal tools to induce state and local cooperation: grants-in-aid; deficit spending; minimum national-standards schemes; waivers of federal law; compliance-deadline extensions; federal forbearance; court orders and consent decrees; and statutory and regulatory penalties. Important advocates of state and local cooperation with federal policies include nongovernmental organizations; state and local administrator lobbyists; public sector union lobbyists and litigators; interest-group lobbyists; citizen lawsuits; and congressional oversight. Essentially, six social and political forces facilitate state and local administrative cooperation with federal policies: professional norms; administrator socialization; public support for federal policies; moral approbation; territorially dispersed diversity; and partisan congruence and bipartisan ratchets. U.S. federalism, however, differs from most European and South Asian federations. It is a dual federal system; it is presidential not parliamentary; it was not created to accommodate territorially based cultural diversity; it has never had fiscal equalization; it has very weak executive federalism; it has no formal intergovernmental councils; and it has no national planning, finance, or election commissions.
