Thursday, June 27, 2013
C3.23 (Oudemanhuispoort)
We now know much more about the extent of sub-national authority and its growth over the last forty years. We know much less - and we know it much less systematically - what sub-national authorities actually do with the wider scope of authority now available to them. We know this least well in European settings which have been especially prominent and dynamic locations of debate about the purposes and scope of sub-national government over the last twenty years or so. We have little systematic understanding of how much the policies experienced by citizens differ from one sub-national jurisdiction to another, whether those differences have grown, and what explains such differences. Drawing on the more advanced North American literature on sub-national policy variation and its polarised benchmarks of 'laboratories of democracy' vs 'race to the bottom', this paper both presents findings from new research on sub-national policy variation in Germany and builds from that to scope out an agenda for more systematic comparative research on sub-national policy variation in decentralised states. It uses German time series data to explore the extent to which sub-national party competition, socio-economic structure and economic performance explain policy difference from place to place within Germany, operationalised through both input indicators (spending decisions) and indicators of policy outcomes across a range of policy fields in the German Laender. It concludes with discussion of the scope for replicating the German study in other states and with that creating robust platform for comparative analysis not just on the scope, but also the consequences of sub-national authority.
