Intergovernmental Relations

The U.S. Origins of Intergovernmental Relations

Intergovernmental relations (IGR) developed in the United States as a subbranch of public administration (itself a subbranch of political science) as a way of analyzing the U.S. federal system. Before World War II, political science studied IGR for its constitutional and legal structures and tended to assume that these structures expressed the totality of relations among levels of government. The growing size and complexity of government and the expanding federal policy programs that occurred in the twentieth century led a number of analysts to become aware that other types of relationships were hidden behind these formal structures. After World War II, these programs continued to expand, which raised questions regarding the formulation and implementation of public policy, the actors involved in the policy process, and the levels across which policies were made and delivered. This led to the growth of the policy sciences, which originated as a branch of political science and public administration but drew on other disciplines such as economics, fiscal studies, and sociology.

IGR may be considered as part of this broad theoretical thrust toward a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of the workings of government. Dale Krane and Deil Wright defined it as “the various combinations of interdependencies and influences among public officials—elected and administrative—in all types and levels of governmental units with particular emphasis on fiscal, policy and political issues.” Wright also argued that IGR has a normative aspect and was to be preferred to federalism as a less value-laden way of referring to the multiple, complex, and interdependent jurisdictional relationships found in the United States. This normative direction of IGR theory led to an emphasis on implementation issues, itself a subbranch of public administration. In the U.S. context, the issue was how IGR affected the implementation of policy programs, and research emphasized the role of, and relationships between, policy actors operating across all governmental and administrative levels. The key question was how to coordinate and manage these relationships in such a way as to improve implementation, and this gave rise to the study of intergovernmental management. This was largely an empirical field of study concerned with examining the most effective policy instruments in an intergovernmental setting. In the United States, such instruments included reorganizing the formal roles and relationships of policy actors and redesigning the shape of organizations, new bodies such as commissions to facilitate horizontal coordination across levels of government, coordination mechanisms, regulatory as well as deregulation mechanisms at different periods of time, and devolution and decentralization.

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