Voice in an asymmetric federation? The U.S. territories as intergovernmental actors

ABSTRACT

United States territories—home to more than 3.5 million Americans—are excluded from the safeguards of American federalism. Unlike states, they are subject to the plenary power of the U.S. Congress, lack core legal protections, and are denied meaningful political representation. As such, territories must find alternative approaches to exercising political voice in the American federal system. Yet territorial-federal relations have received virtually no empirical attention from federalism scholars. To address this gap, we examine territories’ efforts to advance their interests within both bottom-up and top-down intergovernmental councils, as well as through territory-specific advocacy. Our analysis of organizational participation, agendas, and policy outcomes suggests that territories—while denied access to traditional mechanisms of shared rule—do participate in intergovernmental relations, through a combination of bottom-up and top-down multilateral intergovernmental councils (IGCs), as well as bilateral intergovernmental lobbying. Challenges to exercising political voice vary across these institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Territories
• federalism
• intergovernmental councils
• intergovernmental lobbying
• United States

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Michaël Tatham and the anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands are heavily dependent on the tourism industry and face economic stagnation and decline. Guam’s location has made it a hub of US military operations, heavily reliant on the federal defence establishment. Export industries in American Samoa and CNMI remain relatively small, with the former relying predominantly on a single StarKist Tuna cannery (CIA 2021a, 2021b, 2021c, 2021d, 2021e; GAO 2020).

2 While non-voting delegates have repeatedly sought to be able to vote in the Committee of the Whole based on their right to vote in legislative committees, this right has only been sporadically enforced. After briefly gaining the right under a Democratic Congress in 1993 and 2007, non-voting delegates lost the right under Republicans in 1995 and 2011. Democrats reinstated this right in 2019 (Davis 2015; Wickham 2019).

3 Note: our study does not include the 11 U.S. territories with no permanent population (e.g. Jarvis Island, Kingman Reef, and Palmyra Atoll). Nor does it include the three independent countries which have compacts of free association with the United States (including Federated States of Micronesia, Marshall Islands, or Palau).