"Laboratories of Democracry" Through Decentralization

This paper makes the normative case for decentralized federalism on two primary grounds. First, federalism inculcates a tolerance for diversity by spreading policymaking authority across a wide range of jurisdictions, thereby conciliating ethnic, linguistic, cultural, political, and other tensions within the polity. Second, by disaggregating the governmental apparatus into a multitude of component parts, the federal system incentives competition which leads to policy innovation. These points are further refined through the use of a variety of Canadian, American, and international examples.