Intergovernmental Interdependency 55
IV. NATIONAL REGULATORY IMPACTS
Elazar (1984:252) argued over a decade ago that "the American federal system may be passing into a new phase, one in which grants, while remaining important, will no longer set the tone of intergovernmental relations. . . . Now the move seems to be in the direction of new relationships in the field of governmental regulations." Elazar's statement captured a prominent and widely discussed shift in the character of national-state relations in the 1980s. "Regulatory federalism"
was only one manner of describing the shift (ACIR, 1984; Hanus, 1981). A more pointed and pejorative way of describing the new regulatory era was "from coop- erative to coercive federalism" (Kincaid, 1990).
Federal aid is often cited as the defining instrument of cooperative federal- ism. To the extent that there is a singular or distinctive feature of regulatory (or coercive) federalism, it derives from legally based national actions. The varied scope and content of regulatory federalism have been amply explored (ACIR, 1984, 1993; Chubb, 1985b; Conlan, 1986, 1995; Kettl, 1983; Kincaid, 1990, 1993, 1996). Several of its general and specific features are examined below since the 1994 ASAP survey was aimed in part at assessing national regulatory impacts on state administration.
56 Wnght and Cho content of regulatory federalism. We are confident, however, that the queries address directly an important dimension of the "new phase" of federalism high- lighted by Elazar, Kincaid, and others.
State administrators' responses on the first two levels of regulatory impacts are reported in Table 6. Both the reserved-powers issue and policy change ques- tions prompted high levels of impact responses. Nearly three-fourths of the re- spondents agreed that national actions had infringed on the reserved powers of the states and 80% indicated that national actions had program/policy impacts within their state.
These levels of agreement on national impacts are not surprising. The
Table 6 National Regulatory Impacts Reserved Powers and Program/Policy Changes
Some impact Yes No Don't know Degree of impact
Low Moderate High Very high Direction of impact
Positive Neutral Negative
Reserved powers"
72%
10 18 (N = 1180)
13%
29 38 20 (N = 849)
15%
19 66 (N = 731)
Program/policy changes1"
80%
11 9 (N = 1171)
11%
31 41 18 (N = 920)
23%
23 54 (N = 822)
a Question asked Have national legal/regulatory actions (court decision, statutes, regulations) in fringed on the reserved powers of the states9 __ Yes, __ No, __ Don't know
If YES On a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high) indicate the degree of infringement or intrusion
(low) 1 2 3 4 5 (high)
On balance, has the infringement been __ positive, __ neutral, __ negative9
b Question asked Have national legal/regulatory actions altered your state's program and policy prior- ities7 __ Yes, __ No, __ Don't know
If YES On a scale of 1 (low) to 5 (high) indicate the extent of impact of national legal/regulatory actions on your state's program/policy priorities
(low) 1 2 3 4 5 (high)
On balance, has the impact been __ positive, __ neutral, __ negative7
Note Because of rounding the percentages may not add to 100
Intergovernmental Interdependences 57 anger, anguish, and angst surrounding only one type of national regulatory action, unfunded mandates, for example, have been clearly documented (Conlan, 1995).
A counterpoint might also be noted. About 10% of the respondents indicated no impact in either arena, and 10-20% offered Don't Know replies. For a modest proportion (20-30%) of state agency heads, regulatory federalism is a nonissue.
The preponderance of agreement regarding national impacts on the generic and statewide levels does not tell us much, apart from the fact that these may be highly visible, lightening rod issues. The extent and the character of the impacts need to be pursued. For that purpose follow-up questions were asked regarding the extent and direction (positive/negative) of the impacts. The tabulations for these queries are provided in the lower segments of Table 6. The degree of impact was rated on a five-point scale, from 1 (low) to 5 (high). The follow-up on the direction of impact was a three-category response option: positive, neutral, or negative.
On both the reserved-powers and policy change items nearly 60% of the respondents rated national regulatory impacts as high or very high. Clearly, na- tional presence and impacts through regulatory routes have achieved considerable significance among state agency heads in the 1990s. Unfortunately, no earlier comparable data are available on which to base a judgment about regulatory trends. On purely qualitative grounds—such as articles, lobbying efforts, and public statements by state officials—we might expect the 1990s to reflect an increased attentiveness and reaction to regulatory federalism.
Regulatory federalism has entered the intergovernmental scene on a distinc- tively negative note. The term "coercive federalism" is only one illustration of this bias. We should entertain the possibility, however, that national regulatory actions, regardless of their coercive character, might be viewed as having positive consequences at the state level. An example might be court decisions or adminis- trative regulations that prohibit discrimination in the delivery of state services because of race or gender in violation of the equal protection provisions in the
14th Amendment.
The possibility of positive as well as negative reactions to national impacts is reflected in Table 6 as "direction of impact." In the case of reserved powers, there is a small positive component of 15%, and a slightly larger segment (19%) judging national infringement on reserved powers as neutral. On the other hand, two-thirds of the state administrators found national impacts on the reserved pow- ers of the states as negative. The weight of opinion on this generic issue is clearly negative.
When the focus of national impacts shifts to statewide or interagency policy effects, the views of state agency heads are slightly more balanced. Nearly one- fourth (23%) see positive effects and the same proportion sees essentially neutral impacts. Nevertheless, over half report negative effects. The nature of the ques- tion and the responses about statewide impacts offer a limited base for interpreta-
58 Wnght and Cho
tions While negative assessments are in a bare majority, the positive and neutral judgments together produce a more tempered distribution The negative conse
quences of regulatory federalism tor statewide programs and policies appear less severe in the eyes of state agency heads than we might expect