administrative federalism

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

a model of federal governance in which the central government establishes policies, standards, and funding, while subnational governments are responsible for the actual administration, implementation, and delivery of those policies, creating a vertical division of labour between policy-making and execution rather than a territorial division of policy competence; administrative federalism is characteristic of systems like Germany, where the Lander implement federal legislation through their own administrative apparatus, and of the Australian commonwealth, where states deliver many nationally funded programmes; the model can produce efficiency gains by leveraging subnational administrative capacity while maintaining national policy coherence, but it creates accountability gaps when outcomes fall short and responsibility is diffused across levels of government