I had a thought the other day in relation to how impossible it is for a large country to make everyone happy with broad policies. There are big differences in opinions, values, economics, and cultures across a population. What one city, county, province, etc prefers for policy seems to be universally be overridden by “higher level” governance levels going to the top if they so choose. Are there any countries where lower level, more specific jurisdictions get to set policy overrides instead of vice versa? Like, a place where nationwide laws are defaults, but smaller hierarchies can pass laws to supercede the higher defaults?
This is not how that works in all federal systems.
In most of them the things the federal/regional governments can do are mutually exclusive. If a region has the attributions over, say, education policy, the central government can’t override that with a law, it requires a constitutional change to do so. In some cases, the central government gets authority in those areas only if the regional government doesn’t take it.
And the other way around it’s the same thing. A region can’t start making choices on defense, for instance.
When those things are in conflict the federal tier doesn’t automatically override anything, it’s a constitutional crisis and the higher constitutional courts have to resolve which law is actually applicable. They are on equal footing. Otherwise it’s not a federal state, it’s devolved powers like in the UK, which are fundamentally different.
In practice, the states have ceded a huge amount of authority to the federal government over the last 100 years or so. The federal government strong arms them all the time.
Which states and which federal government?
USA, the person you replied to was talking about the US
I’m gonna guess from the scratched and replaced line that this was an edit. The original response was about federal systems in general, the guy generalized from the US, I noted this was not the case in general. I guess I wouldn’t have been confused if you had responded to him, but I was specifically not talking about the US. Muddled online chats with strangers are muddled, I suppose.
Yes, but there are still powers that are set aside to states where the federal government has no legal power. The only reason the federal government has any pull is due to wealth transfers.