Hypothesis about New Mexico

[james_davis_nicoll]

It is not just that there's a 'mexico' in the name, it's that there are too many states to keep track of the names. How many nations have the equivalent of fifty plus provinces and territories?

Accordingly, how would you lump the states together to get a dozen or so states of roughly equal population?

Comments

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

82 equivalent to states? Is it not more like 4?

[viktor-haag.livejournal.com]

The problem with saying "equivalent to states" is that I think there isn't a tidy equivalency. England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales are more than States, and while the counties might seem less than States by name, by function they're probably roughly equivalent.

You have the same problem in France. The municipal level of government is properly the "commune", not the "department". The regional level of government is sort of oddly and awkwardly (or some might argue, "elegantly") split between the Regions and their constituent Departments.

In some ways, historically the natural "autonomous" regional administration structure is the department, which aggregated into regions. But there has been growing pressure over the past few decades to rationalize regional administration -- of course, then you have the "abolish the region" faction versus the "abolish the department" faction. The plain fact of the matter is it's most likely that if have you only one layer there it'd need to be more granular than the region, but probably less granular than the department. (I offer this detail only as someone who lived in France for a year twenty years ago, so my grasp on current politics there is extremely tenuous.)

Anyway, both the UK and France are unitary, not federal states like Canada and the US, so all the organization below the state level is administrative, not legislative. So properly speaking neither have things "equivalent" to States in one sense (ability to make laws and their own rules), but they must in another (responsibility to organize and direct the business of governing).

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I didn't think it applied to France or Japan either. And if I had to guess, I would go for it the different countries in the USSR (if they were allowed legislative power), but not Russia. And the EU isn't a nation.

But don't Scotland and Northern Ireland have some legal differences to England and Wales, eg house buying, abortion, equality rules?

I'm guessing England's 82 are counties, or their successor? US states have counties too, though I've no ideal if they're legally and administrively equivalent.

And does England really have 82 things that are equivalent to NI, Scotland, Wales? Do they not have their own counties or divisions? I know NI has 6 traditional counties.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales have legal power over various matters to differing degrees:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserved_matters

It sounds to me as if Scotland now has legal status somewhat greater than a US state, the others maybe somewhat less, though it's not an exact comparison.

In the US, the status of counties varies from state to state. In some states like Virginia, incorporated cities and counties are geographically exclusive, so counties generally provide the local government in areas that are not inside of cities. In others, like Massachusetts, cities and towns geographically cover every point in the state, and counties are an overlay of larger regions whose government is nearly vestigial (controlling the court and prison systems and not much else).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...and looking further into the matter reveals that Connecticut, Rhode Island, and portions of Massachusetts in fact have no county government at all; those counties are purely geographic divisions.

New England is a bit unusual, though.