Joint Decision-Making in Comparison – Retrenchment of Subnational Competences or Essential for Policy-Making?

Abstract

Joint-decision-making describes a constellation where the federal and the state level must agree about public policies. The application of the initial concept to the EU brought up not only an enhancement of the concept (Scharpf 2006) since it was limited to the negative biased theoretical construction of the joint decision trap (Scharpf 1988) – especially with regard to the relationship between German federalism and the EU. In contrast, the comparison of different federal or quasi-federal systems highlights that in daily political practice joint-decision-making is one of the fundamental prerequisites for policy-making. This is grounded in the fact that a high number of political problems exceed the traditional distribution of competences between the federal and the state level. Against this background two questions should be addressed by the panel: Which forms of joint-decision-making do exist in other federal systems and how is the concept applied to explain these forms? What is the impact of different forms of joint decision-making, e.g. as regards power of the different levels, the role of parliaments or the effectiveness of policy-making? A particular focus should be on how different forms of joint-decision-making can be categorised in a generalising way. Possible features might be formal versus informal, vertical versus horizontal, sectorial versus general, financial versus legal forms of joint decision making etc. Paper givers are encouraged to present case studies on the evolution and impact of these different forms of joint-decision-making in their country or to provide comparative studies.

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