Reforms of Federalism and Intergovernmental Cooperation through Vertical Agreements: Switzerland and Germany Compared

In federal states governments sign agreements committing them to exchange information, coordinate public policies and allocate financial amounts. It is frequently renowned that these cooperation contracts are introduced as part of constitutional reforms. In the past twenty years alone, most established Western federal states have undertaken major constitutional reforms aimed at a reallocation of responsibilities, tasks and resources between levels of governments. In order to respond to new pressing policy challenges – i.e immigration or environment, most of these reforms accordingly introduced such vertical agreements. These contracts require close collaboration between the federal, subnational, and (more indirectly) local governments, and subsequently becoming part of a broader multi-level governance framework. However to date, research on intergovernmental contracts in a comparative perspective has remained quite under-developed. Therefore, the aim of the paper is threefold. First, it compares two reforms of federalism in Switzerland and Germany respectively that partly redefined the intergovernmental relations after numerous constitutional changes. A closer look will be made on the vertical cooperation dynamics with attention to several variables, such as institutional structures, political composition of governments, actors’ interests, and territorial diversities. The second intention is to identify and analyze the vertical agreements applied in each country. While the German contracts – the so-called Verwaltungsabkommen - are applied since 1969, Switzerland is using a broad variety of cooperation agreements but also newly adopted the conventions-programs after the 2008 reform of the fiscal equalization and the allocation of tasks. While the federalism reform objectives were relatively similar in both federal states and the contracts are comparable, realizations on the field are substantially different, depending on the historical, political, territorial and cultural structures of each country. The third objective of the paper is to examine a particular public policy that was and still is quite controversial in both states in terms of governmental responsibilities: the higher education. This empirical case study provides observation of successful redistributive competences, but also points out some incoherencies and difficulties. With this comparative analysis approach, based on qualitative data derived from peer-reviewed articles, interviews, and recent governmental evaluations, I will determine whether there are best practices to be established in terms of federalism reforms and Intergovernmental cooperation, with special interest in the use of vertical agreements.