Bulletin n. 1/2016 | ||
June 2016 | ||
Hildebrandt Achim, Wolf Frieder |
||
How Much of a Sea-Change? Land Policies after the Reforms of Federalism | ||
in German Politics , Volume 25, Issue 2, Special Issue: Reframing German Federalism , 2016 , 227-242 | ||
The reforms of German federalism in 2006 and 2009 that widened the scope of Länder powers and rearranged Germany's fiscal structures were met with great expectations as well as outright hostility. This article analyses how the resulting patterns of Länder policies and their determinants differ from the period between re-unification and the 2006 reforms. It focuses on higher education and environmental law, the two areas over which initial reform attempts in 2004 had failed and where changes were especially far-reaching and debates especially emotional. If indeed a new type of federalism, and of Land-level politics in particular, has emerged, it would be most likely to manifest itself regarding these policies. Our theoretical approach contrasts expectations of intensified policy competition between the Länder with institutional, partisan and political-cultural factors working towards continued co-ordinated, incremental muddling-through. So far, our empirical analysis shows, the latter seem to dominate. | ||