The Divided States of America presents an argument that federalism is responsible for inequalities across the United States and that, when considering government services, “federalism matters, and as a citizen, it depends on where you live” (p. 88). To make this argument, Donald Kettl provides a historical account of controversies surrounding federalism in the United States, starting from the differing positions of Madison and Hamilton on down to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. Chapters 2–4 examine federalism until the 1960s, and chapters 5–8 dig deeper into the current “fourth generation of federalism.” Kettl draws on analyses of poverty, health care, and other issues to argue that the state-level administration of federal policies produced undesirable inequalities across states. He concludes with suggested changes to federalism, advocating for a more Hamiltonian approach with a “stronger, sounder, and more efficient federal government” (p. 202) to remedy such inequalities.

Kettl provides a well-written and accessible historical account of federalism in the United States, starting with discussion of the founding. Kettl begins by calling Madison’s federalism one of the “most essential” inventions for the new nation. He then divides the history of federalism in the United States into four generations. The foci of the first generation are disputes concerning what the federal government could do and what states could not do under the new Constitution. This discussion largely centers on debates pertaining to the Tenth Amendment and brings important attention to the federal government’s early use of grants to implement policies in the states. These grants would be foundational for setting up state and local governments as administrative units. After surprisingly little discussion of the Civil War, Kettl turns to the second generation of federalism and the implications of Plessy v. Ferguson, such as the importance of policy procedure versus results, followed by the third generation of federalism, sparked by the Brown v. Board decision, which ruled the practice of “separate but equal” unconstitutional.

The primary focus of The Divided States of America is the fourth generation of federalism, which takes place from the 1960s until the present day. Kettl offers examples of how federalism increasingly shaped socioeconomic policies, such as the Great Society. When making these policies, leaders in the federal government often found it easier to satisfy political opposition by leaving the details of program administration and regulations to the states, rather than have the federal government take on this responsibility. A recent instance where federalism offered a path to compromise for thorny political issues was when the federal government delegated management of health care exchanges to the states. Kettl uses the ACA along with Medicaid, providing clean water to residents of Flint, Michigan, and other policies to emphasize this point: “the more the design and implementation of programs rests in state hands, the more different, in both the tactics and outcomes, they are likely to be” (p. 103). The ACA is a nice example for this argument, given the great differences in the health care exchanges offered by different states; for Kettl, these differences exemplify how inequalities across states can be credited to how federalism currently operates.

To provide additional evidence of such inequalities, Kettl considers a range of policy outcomes, such as poverty levels, imprisonment rates, and air quality. Using policy measures largely from the 2010s, Kettl classifies states as “most leading” and “least leading” (Table 5.1), which helps facilitate the discussion of inequalities in the second half of the book. Kettl’s classifications and rankings of states across policy areas highlight worrying levels of inequality across states, but there are at least three areas where the analysis could be more thorough: (1) establishing why we should care about inequality more than the improvement of outcomes; (2) identifying the relationship between changes in federalism (i.e., the shift to the fourth generation) and changes in policy outcomes; and (3) incorporating other explanations for differences and inequalities across states.

Revisiting Kettl’s discussion of poverty helps illustrate the concerns raised by the first two points. Poverty is particularly important for Kettl, because having an impoverished population could lead states to have different amounts of money with which to provide services. Kettl clearly shows that levels of poverty vary across states, suggesting there is inequality across them, but he does less to show that poverty has become worse under the fourth generation of federalism. When looking over time at the same poverty measure used by Kettl (Figure 5.2), I find the poverty rate across the “most leading” states dropped 0.9% from 1980 to 2016, but in the “least leading” states it dropped by 1.8%.

If the “least leading” states improved more than the “most leading states” during the fourth generation of federalism, it raises the question of whether we should care more about current inequality across states versus whether states improved in this time period. This example also looks at changes over time instead of looking at a snapshot of measures of policy outcomes. Kettl does examine changes over time (e.g., Table 7.2 or Figure 7.2), but the presentation of such statistics is less common in his analyses. Examination of changes during the fourth generation of federalism would present a stronger case for a relationship between federalism and inequality across states.

To further establish that inequality across states is attributable to federalism, Kettl’s argument could also take greater advantage of research on inequality and state politics. Chapter 10 considers prior empirical work, but this discussion almost appears to be an afterthought. Instead, this research could have been used to motivate analyses in the previous, empirical chapters. For instance, more fully engaging Nolan McCarty’s work with Boris Shor, Keith Poole, and Howard Rosenthal concerning polarization within states and the relationship between inequality and polarization would illuminate how the two central foci of The Divided States of America—inequality and policy making—are likely linked.

Kettl ultimately suggests that there be a revision of how federalism operates in the United States. He advocates for a more Hamiltonian version of federalism in which states are “instruments of coherent national actions devoted to reducing the inequality between and within the states” (pp. 202, 19). Such a solution could reduce inequalities, but it is not clear whether the centralized, federal policies that Kettl seeks could be enacted in a gridlocked Washington. As he notes, federal politicians use federalism to address their “toughest domestic problems— problems that federal officials want to address but cannot agree on how to go about it” (p. 171). For example, both the Johnson and Obama administrations gave states more administrative power to obtain the needed compromise with opponents to implement their health care policy reforms. But Kettl does not provide a path for how political leaders would overcome existing, similar political disagreements under a fifth generation of federalism.

Overall, The Divided States of America offers readers a well-written and accessible account of many key events pertaining to federalism and inequalities in the United States. There are areas where the book could do more to convince readers of a relationship between federalism and inequality, but it should be of interest to scholars of federalism.