What is meant by the concept “laboratories of democracy”? Essay Example

country. However, if detrimental the abolishment will continue while Washington and Colorado will be forced to drop such a law. This clearly shows that states act as laboratories for experimenting policies and laws without putting the whole country into risk (Bruce, Swanstrom, Seidelman, and DeLuca, 36).

Allowing states to act independently increases the chances of developing new ideas on laws and regulations. Being “laboratories of democracy” the state and local government’s increases innovation in creating laws and regulations. In this case, there exists progressive federalism whereby the national government spearheads a kind of tournament between the states to develop the best solution to a national problem (Bowman, Ann and Kearney, 44). The state that develops the winning approach with a policy showing the best effects to the society keeps the policy while the other states are forced to adopt the policy even if it does not align with the state’s political ideology. This implies that when these laws succeed in the laboratory states, the other states and the national government can copy the laws. If the experimentation fails in one state, others states can learn from the failure and improve the policies. After improving the policies, other states can be used to experiment in order to determine if improvement can lead to positive effect to the society. On the other hand, government experimentation on the credibility of new laws is made possible by the existence of different states in U.S. When the government wants to enact a new law, it experiments with specific states but not the whole country. If the law is successful then it is nationalized (Robbins and Kalyani, 179). From the above explanation,

it is clear that the state and local governments are the ideal laboratories of creating laws and regulations because they facilitate the testing of new laws without putting the nation into risk.

Work Cited

1. Bowman, Ann O. M, and Richard C. Kearney. State and Local Government: The Essentials. , 2014. Print.
2. Miroff, Bruce, Todd Swanstrom, Raymond Seidelman, and Tom DeLuca. The Democratic Debate. , 2014. Print.
3. Robbins, Kalyani. The Law and Policy of Environmental Federalism: A Comparative Analysis. , 2015. Print.