POLS 225 PROFESSOR
FRANK BRYAN
INTERGOVERNMENTAL
RELATIONS COURSE NO. 91728
Course Requirements and Expectations
This is a senior level seminar. Significant preparation and participation is
expected from everyone. Each member of
the seminar is important to its success.
Therefore, class attendance is essential and I will record it. There is no basic text to purchase for this
course but substantial reading is required.
I will make many of the assigned readings available by placing them on
reserve. But, please note,
because one of the goals of the course is to make sure you graduate from UVM
with some library skills, I will not place on reserve "standard"
stuff like the Federalist Papers or a Supreme Court decision or an
article in a journal I know is in the library and can't be taken out.
A key component of the course is a
research project which you will present to your colleagues during class time
and which will be the basis for a paper you will present to me by December 17.
(This is two days before the end of the exam period.) For obvious reasons I strongly urge you to
have it completed before exams begin.
There is no final exam in the course.
An hour test will be given on
October 14. This will be an essay exam
dealing with: (1) the theoretical and descriptive elements of my lectures and
the assigned readings and (2) the methodological / policy component of my
lectures.
The
Grading Breakdown
Class participation 30%
daily attendance &
participation 15%
the paper presentation 15%
Hour Exam 30%
Paper 40%
Dates to Remember
Tuesday, September 30th Paper Proposal Due
Tuesday,
October 14th Hour
Exam
TBA Paper
Presentation
Wednesday,
December 17th Final Paper Due
The
Paper
It has struck me over
the years that there has been no direct relationship between the technical
quality of papers submitted to me and the development of electronic word
processing capacities. Papers look
neater (even prettier) and more symmetrical but the mechanics are as shoddy as
ever. I don't give points for things
like right justification, color, or fancy covers. Therefore, the first requirement is that it
be clean, clear, properly outlined, footnoted and formatted. Remember words "to" and
"too" or "there" and "their" will not be flagged
by a spell check. Computers can't do
everything. (Yet.)
Second, I want these
papers to become your best piece of written work in your undergraduate
career. That is, when you are asked by a
graduate school, law school, or employer to submit a sample of your written
work, I want you (without hesitation) to reach for the paper you wrote for this course. Be proud of your work!
Finally, the content
of your paper must be designed, if not to answer original questions with
original research, at least to provide interesting insights to important
questions. Envision your paper as a
publishable piece of research--that is, to be able to argue that if it were
done well it would be interesting and/or useful to some (even if very
small) audience beyond the university. For
example something like the "Vermont School Finance Newsletter" on the
minimalist end or the "Maine Policy Review" in the middle or the
magazine "Governing" on the high end. Go for it.
Conceptual
Boundaries
Intergovernmental
Relations has evolved from the study of federalism (almost exclusively) to the
study of interactions of a wide spectrum of governmental structures. Still, the principal focus of the course
begins with and is grounded in the relationships between the states and the
national government. Beyond this,
however, the study of intergovernmental relations deals with the connections
between the states and their localities, these localities and the federal
government, the states with one another and non-profit "quasi public"
institutions with all three levels of government.
IGR has also moved (as
has much of political science) away from the study of structure and process to
the study of behavior and public policy.
Yet IGR is more concerned with policy because it deals with the
interactions of institutions.
Other areas of political science are more properly concerned with behavior
since they are dealing with individuals.
In this course I will
use questions of public policy as vehicles to carry us into (and, hopefully,
through) the tangled underbrush that chokes our understanding of why
governments do what they do. Thus in
many ways this course might be defined (at least in part) as a course in public
policy taught against a background of political structure and using comparative
techniques with the states and their localities as the fundamental unit of
analysis.
Lecture
Schedule
PART
ONE
(The
states and the nation)
Lectures
(A) Theories of
Federalism
(B) Federalism in the
Constitution
(C) American
Federalism -- the Bias Toward the Center
(D) Federalism in the
Court
(E) Methods I
(F) Methods II
Required
1. William
Livingston A Note on the Nature of
Federalism (R)
2. Martin Diamond What the Framers Meant by Federalism (R)
3. Walter Burns The Meaning of the 10th Amendment (R)
4. Hunter and Oakerson
"The Intellectual Crisis in American
Federalism" Publius 16 (1986)
5. James Madison The Federalist Papers no. 39.
6. John Marshall McCullouch vs
7.
Kenneth Meier Introduction to Regression
Analysis (R)
PART
TWO
(The
Localities and the States)
Lectures
(A) "Baker vs
Carr" and the Creatures of the State
(B) Local
Governments: What they Look Like, How
they Work
(C) The "Erosion
of Local Autonomy"
(D) The Case of
Educational Finance
(E) The Chaos of
Sub-state Jurisdictions
(F) Interstate
Politics and the Variants of Public Policy
Required
1. R. Briffault
"Centralization and Constitutional Law" (R)
2. Baker vs Carr
(1962)
3. Stevens
"State Centralization and the Erosion of Local Autonomy" Journal
of Politics (Feb. 1974)
4. C. Mathesian "The Quagmire
of Educational Finance" (R)
5.
C. Smith "Tax Reform and State Educational Spending" (R)
PART
THREE
(Variants
of Public Policy)
Lectures
(A) Fiscal Federalism
(B) Models of Taxation
(C) Social Services
(D) Education
(E) The Environment
(F) Law Enforcement
Required
1. Robert
Stein, The Allocation of
Federal Aid Monies: The Synthesis of Demand-Side and Supply Side Explanations The American Political Science Review 75 (1981)
pp. 334-343.
2. Frances
Berry and William Berry, Tax Innovation in
the States: Capitalizing on Political
3. Virginia
Gray, Federalism and Health
Care, PS: Political Science and Politics
27 (1994), pp. 217-220.
4. Susan
H. Fuhrman, Legislatures and
Education Policy in the 1990's Publius 24
(1994), pp. 83-98.
5. Bruce
Williams and Albert Matseny, Testing Theories of
Social Regulation: Hazardous Waste Regulation in the American States, Journal of Politics 46 (1984), pp. 428-458.
PART
FOUR
(Issues)
Lectures
(A) Crossover Sanctions and the
Issues of Federal Blackmail
(B) Mandates and Prescription,
Keeping Power--Delegating Blame
(C) Innovation: Where Does it Come
From?
(D) Federalism and the Problem of
Variety
(E) Levels of Government and the
Democratic Process
(F) Whither Federalism in the Post
Industrial Period
Required
1. Ali
Sevin, Highway Sanctions:
Circumventing the Constitution, State
Legislatures 15 (1989), pp. 25-29 (R)
2. Jacqueline
Colmes, Bricks Without
Straw: the Complaints Go on but Congress Keeps mandating, Governing September (1988), pp. 21-26 (R)
3. Ellen
Perlman, The Gorilla that
Swallows State Laws Governing, August (1994) (R)
4. Robert
J. Pranger, The Decline of the
American National Government, Publius
Fall (1973)
PART
FIVE
(Papers)