State administrators and perceptions of national-state relations

This dissertation has two major research goals. One is to empirically explore emerging patterns in national-state relations in the American federal system from the perspectives of state officials. The main focus of this analysis is on assessing the impact of Reagan's New Federalism during the 1980s. The other goal is to examine the explanatory factors that may affect state officials' perceptions of national-state relations. I developed fifteen independent variables, which are divided into three groups: selected personal characteristics, political factors and federal aid factors. The data base for pursuing these research goals are the 1974, 1984 and 1988 American State Administrators Project (ASAP) surveys — mail questionnaire surveys of responding state agency heads from all 50 states. With minor differences, these three surveys contain almost identical items that permit comparative analyses to be performed of different points of time. For the trends in national-state relations, the findings, confirmed the hypothesis that state administrators in the 1974 present more conflictual and less cooperative perceptions than do state administrators in 1984, whereas the state administrators in 1984 present more cooperative and less conflictual perceptions than state administrators in the 1988. However, the findings were supported only with weak empirical evidence. The results of analysis for the explanatory variables sort out three significant variables that affect state officials' perception in national-state relations: (1) Centralist/Decentralist, (2) Party Identification, and (3) Interactions with national officials initiated by state officials. Since the Initiated Interaction variable is considerably affected by the other two variables, a common characteristic of the three variables can be summarized as state officials' personal political views. Deregulation, devolution and decentralization initiatives supported by Reagan's New Federalism are closely related to the state officials' political views such as their party identification and their basic perspectives on the allocations of power between the nation and states. Consequently, the changes in state officials' perceptions between 1974 and 1988 may be mainly affected by the changes in state officials' personal political views; in turn, their political views are affected by the failure of Reagan's New Federalism.