The challenge of regionalist institutions without regionalist politics
-
Roderick M. Hills
Abstract
Scholarship on regionalist institutions lacks a theory of regionalist politics because we lack regional political parties, without which regional politics is difficult. Particularly in the United States, regional governments are the product of either intergovernmental agreements between governments controlled by ostensibly national parties or state statutes and federal grants administered by ostensibly nonpartisan bureaucrats.
The absence of truly regionalist politics and parties creates problems for governmental problem-solving at both the national and regional levels. First, politics abhors a vacuum: In the absence of truly regionalist parties, politics generates semi-regionalized parties that risk hindering national policymaking with the parochial outlook of the semi-regionalized politicians. Second, regional politics are important tools for organizing both legislators and voters to pursue regionally controversial ends requiring political compromise. National parties organized around national issues cannot perform this function at the regional level. Without regional parties organized around issues like overcoming NIMBY (“not-in-my-backyard”) resistance to housing, for instance, it is difficult to rally politicians to take politically costly positions on those issues. This Article aims to solve the problem of missing regionalist parties and politics in two steps—first, with a taxonomy of regional governments and regionalist and semi-regionalist parties along with their respective benefits and burdens, and second, with very modest suggestions for promoting regionalist and discouraging semi-regionalist, parties. None of these solutions is perfect. Genuinely regionalist democracy presents an unsolvable problem, resulting from the inevitable cognitive limits of voters and the organizational incentives of politicians at every level of government.
© 2023 by Theoretical Inquiries in Law
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Regionalisms: Shifting Scales Between Cities and States
- Introduction
- Seeing like a region
- The political stakes of regions
- Cities in a world of regions – Remarks from an international law perspective
- Megalopolis bound?
- Can micropolitan areas bridge the urban-rural divide?
- The democratic problems with Washington as the capital
- The science of urban regions: Public-science-community partnerships as a new mode of regional governance?
- Communities of competitors: Toward leveraging the region’s contradictions
- Regionalism as a mode of inclusive citizenship in divided societies
- A typology of the localism-regionalism nexus
- Shadow regionalism in immigration enforcement during COVID-19
- National priority regions (1971–2022): Redistribution, development and settlement
- The challenge of regionalist institutions without regionalist politics
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Regionalisms: Shifting Scales Between Cities and States
- Introduction
- Seeing like a region
- The political stakes of regions
- Cities in a world of regions – Remarks from an international law perspective
- Megalopolis bound?
- Can micropolitan areas bridge the urban-rural divide?
- The democratic problems with Washington as the capital
- The science of urban regions: Public-science-community partnerships as a new mode of regional governance?
- Communities of competitors: Toward leveraging the region’s contradictions
- Regionalism as a mode of inclusive citizenship in divided societies
- A typology of the localism-regionalism nexus
- Shadow regionalism in immigration enforcement during COVID-19
- National priority regions (1971–2022): Redistribution, development and settlement
- The challenge of regionalist institutions without regionalist politics
