Foundations, Perspectives, and Issues of American Intergovernmental Relations

摘要

The study of intergovernmental relations deals with how the many and varied governments in the United States interact with one another and what their relative roles, responsibilities, and levels of influence are and should be. This often-controversial topic has been a long-standing concern throughout the political and administrative histories of the United States. Conflicts involving intergovernmental relations have helped shape or even led directly to a series of major turning points in U.S. history, including the American Civil War, the establishment of a social welfare state under President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, the fight to end poverty in the 1960s, the implementation of welfare reform policies in the 1990s, and the heightened homeland security efforts of the twenty-first century.