How cooperative is “cooperative federalism”? The political limits to intergovernmental cooperation under a de facto concurrency rule

Abstract

AbstractProponents of “cooperative federalism” claim that intergovernmental behaviour is endogenous to legal rules about legislative competences: a concurrency rule systematically induces intergovernmental cooperation, where an exclusivity rule systematically impedes it. Citing the imperative for greater cooperation, courts in classical, or dualist, federal systems have used legal doctrine to fashion zones of de facto legislative concurrency. We develop a formal model to explore the soundness of this reasoning. Our analysis complicates courts’ simplistic expectation. Under our assumptions, cooperation may be supported in equilibrium, but only under quite restrictive conditions. We show how the impact (if any) of a de facto concurrency rule on government behaviour depends on the paramountcy rule, government policy preferences relative to the status quo, policy development costs, and the risk of costly political backlash. We pair our theoretical analysis with a study of Canadian federalism jurisprudence and its impact on Canadian securities regulation.