What are the pros and cons of federalism in the United States? Federalism is a political system in which regional governments share power with a central or national government, but each level of government has legal powers independent of the other. Federalism is what keeps our so-called balanced government. I'll start with the pros first. We can say that federalism mobilizes political activity, various levels of government give citizens different levels to be heard, it gives them higher levels of command to go through to get to where they want to be. Federalism affects interest groups more than anyone else because they cannot simply take control of national governments but must first go through state and local governments. This is where you get the dispersion of power: “a key goal for the founders was to disperse power, and a two-tier system that divided power not only between branches of government, but also between levels of government helped to achieve this objective” (Bond, page 80). For example, the legislative branch makes laws, the executive branch executes them, and the judicial branch...