The U.S. Department of State officially recognizes 195 independent nation states in the world today.
25 of these countries use federalism: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ethiopia, Germany, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Switzerland, Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Comoros, Malaysia, Micronesia, Nepal, Russia, St. Kitts and Nevis, South Africa, Spain, United Arab Emirates, United States of America, and Venezuela.
"Map of unitary and federal states" by Lokal_Profil. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Commons - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_of_unitary_and_federal_states.svg#/media/File:Map_of_unitary_and_federal_states.svg
In the map above, the countries in green are the ones that have a federalist government. Generally speaking, most of these countries are fairly large in land mass.
A unitary system is "a system of political organization in which most or all of the governing power resides in a centralized government." (http://www.britannica.com/topic/unitary-system)
There are 168 nations using unitary system. Of these, the ones with the largest population are China, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Japan, and the Philippines and the ones with the largest GDP being China, Japan, the United Kingdom, France and Italy.
Federalism tends to leave more power with the people while in unitary nations the government has much more power. The advantage to federalism is that the individual states have power and so they can form laws and legislation without the federal government being involved. The advantage to a unitary state is that the government is more unified throughout the country. The disadvantage of unitary states is that the different areas it controls do not have individual power. The disadvantage of federalism is that there is not as much unity in the laws throughout the country.
In the cartoon above, the tall man has a bag that says Federal Benefits and a sheet that says Federal authority. The short man, labeled states, is accepting the benefits and declining the authority. The cartoonist seems to be making the statement that the problem with federalism is that states do not want an authority over them but are perfectly willing to accept the benefits of being part of a federalist country.
In the above cartoon, the cartoonist is making the claim that medicinal marajuana should be legalized and that patients should not have to suffer due to unjust national laws.
The cartoonist is making the elephant a politician to represent the Republican party. They think that Republicans make a lot of statements about supporting states rights but only actually want to follow through on things that fit their political platform.
In this video, our government system is described as a three layer cake of local, state, and federal government systems. It says that federalism is splitting the power of government among these different levels.
If this picture were used to describe federalism, then it would be to explain how the different powers are distributed among the different parts of government. Unlike in the layer cake example, where the national government is the base layer for the other two, the marble cake implies that the different levels work together and combine to form our government; that it is more collaborative and less about divisions.
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