major political parties.
Hopkin (2003; 2009) provides a perspective on UK devolution in terms of the party system. In the earlier paper, Hopkin (2003) had argued that there is a need for party specialists to focus more on the “territorial dimension” of electoral politics, or what he calls “spatial and geographical aspects of party competition” (Hopkin 2003: 227). In his more recent work, Hopkin (2009), analyses the relationship between political devolution/decentralisation and the organisation of political parties, using the Labour Party in the UK and the Socialist Party in Spain as his comparative case examples. “party” is a significant causal factor within the matrix and multiplicity of conditioning variables that shape the emergence of MLG in mature and advanced polities.
The British state is becoming increasingly decentralised, regionalised, fragmented and polycentric, and is no longer amenable to systematic study using more traditional frameworks of analysis. In particular, the highly centralised and executive-centred Westminster Model, despite its continued widespread application to that system by both British and non-British scholars, now seems to be largely outdated and inapplicable to changing political realities. Notwithstanding its continued status as a relatively centralised unitary state in many comparative textbooks, devolution has brought some major changes to overall patterns of UK governance. At the same time, it has spawned several important efforts among scholars to fashion novel or recast earlier analytical frameworks that are better able to highlight the rapidly changing realities of the current economically globalised and politically interdependent world. The multilevel governance approach is only one of several new analytical frameworks that are currently being devised by scholars, but it is clear from our summary above that it is among those that are most frequently applied to UK politics. In fact, somewhat paradoxically, this framework may prove to be more adaptable to [44] the British state than to many theoretically more decentralised political systems, including parliamentary and presidential federations.
Germany: Federal System Reforms (2005 to the Present)
There is an important link between the origins of the concept of multilevel governance and the German federal system. Scharpf’s (1988) work on the “joint-decision trap” in the German federal system was cited as a major theoretical reference point for the concept of multilevel governance (Jachtenfuchs 2006, cited in Stein and Turkewitsch 2008: 7). In its relatively short existence, the concept of multilevel governance has therefore had important ties to German federalism. Research and theorising about German federalism has brought us important insights about multilevel governance and intergovernmental relations in the EU. The two-way interaction process between the concepts of federalism and multilevel governance has continued. Developments in the MLG literature can now be applied in a new light to the German system. We suggest that when applied to the German federal system, multilevel governance is increasingly an important conceptual tool through which scholars can analyse recent political and institutional developments.
The German system includes the local level, counties, inter-municipal bodies, the Länder, the federal level; the EU level; as well as Type II multilevel governance structures that exist at different levels, and often span these levels. However, the emergence of new forms of governance, incorporating the supranational (EU) level and expanding to include NGOs and other actors, has been controversial from the perspective of the Länder, whose governments resent the loss of policy making autonomy and perceive it as a threat to democratic legitimacy (Jeffery 2007: 24).
A number of terms, including “cooperative federalism” and “inter-locking federalism” have been used to describe the linking of federal and Länder level policy-making (Benz and Zimmer 2011: 149). Others have used the term “unitary federalism”3 to describe the system (Moore et al 2008: 396). Scharpf suggested that the interlocking nature of the system leads to a lack of transparency in decision-making and makes it hard to tell which level of government holds the ultimate responsibility (Moore et al 2008: 396). This reasoning led Abromeit to describe Germany as a “hidden unitary state”4 (Moore et al 2008: 396). All of these terms refer to the more unique features of the German federal system. In this sense, they have the advantage of helping us understand the [45] changing intergovernmental system in Germany, and in the case of Scharpf’s work, its similarities to the EU. However, these concepts are less useful for broader comparative analysis. In contrast, the concept of MLG is valuable because it allows us to analyse features shared in common by both federal and decentralised unitary systems, as well as the EU.
As reflected in the terms “unitary federalism” and “hidden unitary state,” a major concern shared by academics and politicians at the federal and Land levels is that German federalism is too centralised. There have been a number of reforms to the German federal system since its creation. However, most of these reforms did little to address concerns over the centralised nature of the federation, and even exacerbated some issues related to the “joint-decision trap” (Auel 2008). In the early years of the twenty-first century, there was a strong push for further reforms (Moore et al 2008: 396). The government set up the Federal Reform Commission in 2003 to explore ways of reducing the degree of joint-decision making in the German federal system. However, the commission’s reform process failed, and instead, the Grand Coalition government, led by Angela Merkel, introduced constitutional changes that came into effect in 2006 (Moore et al 2008: 396). Overall, these reforms decentralised powers to the Länder, giving them, for example, exclusive competences in the areas of education, including post-secondary-education (Benz and Zimmer 2011: 167; Moore et al. 2008: 398).
A number of political scientists have criticised the reforms for not going far enough5. Auel points out that, on paper, the reforms of 2006 are the most broad-ranging changes to the Basic Law since its creation in 1949, at least in terms of the actual number of amendments (Auel 2008: 427). However, Auel suggests that the reforms may be counter-productive and do not offer any “escape” from Scharpf’s “joint-decision trap” (Auel 2008: 425). Benz writes that as a result of the reforms, German governance is “neither more effective nor more democratic” and that the “federal system is in danger of losing necessary flexibility” (Benz 2008: 440). He suggests that the legislative system is still too centralised to be effective (Benz 2008: 442). Jeffery notes that one reason put forth for the fact that the reforms did not go as far as necessary is because Germany has a “unitary political culture.” The country does not have the territorial cleavages that are often present in other, more decentralised, federations. Without these cleavages, the German system leans towards uniform policies across the Länder (Jeffery 2008: 589). Scharpf agrees with the general consensus that the reforms did not go far enough (Scharpf 2008: 509). In terms of the outcome of the reforms, Scharpf does not find a move away from the jointdecision trap, in the sense that “the need for compromises between the government majority and the opposition, and thus the possibility of party political blockades, remains pretty much unchanged” (Scharpf 2008: 514).
[46] There is little discussion of Type II MLG in Germany in the federalism literature. This mirrors our findings in our earlier conference papers with respect to the literature on federalism in the United States and Latin America, and to a lesser extent, Canada. For example, in his discussion of multilevel governance in Germany and Switzerland, Braun acknowledges the existence of Type II multilevel governance, but chooses not to include an examination of this type of MLG (Braun 2011: 181, endnote 1). We suggest that political scientists studying intergovernmental relations in federal and decentralised unitary systems should increasingly take note of interactions that can be best understood through the conceptual lens of Type II MLG. We find more discussion of Type II MLG in the public policy, public administration, and local governance/urban studies literature. From a comparative and analytical perspective, an interesting form of Type II MLG that is emerging in Germany is inter-municipal cooperation (Wollmann 2010: 265). Harfst and Wurst (2011) provide another empirical example of Type II MLG in their study of environmental rehabilitation of mining regions in the former East German Länder.
In the German system, political parties, and specifically, party politics, play an important role in intergovernmental relations (Däubler
