A sharing-based policy dynamic in multilevel systems: Lessons from Germany’s Online Access Law

While the digitalization of public services is a core policy priority, governments in the European Union (EU) are still figuring out how to successfully make digitalization work in practice. The German Online Access Law (Onlinezugangsgesetz; OZG) anticipated Europe’s Digital Decade (EDD) which sets out ambitious digital targets as part of the EU’s digitalization strategy. Given the multi-level structure of the German federal system, we argue that the implementation arrangement of the OZG potentially offers lessons for the future working of the EDD. To understand how multi-level institutional arrangements affect policy effects, Weaver (2020) proposed twelve distinct “policy dynamics” in federal systems, that is, durable constellations of political actors and causal mechanisms that have distinctive policy consequences over time. This paper proposes a new, sharing-based policy dynamic in multi-level systems, based on the case of the OZG. In this policy dynamic governments collaborate in the development of the solution to a policy problem and share the outcome of this between them, due to pressures like the coercion of a higher level, high costs or short timeframes. In a strong form this dynamic leads to a homogenous implementation in all or most federal units. In a more muted form, only a smaller group of federal units will share the developed solution. Key actors are policy experts as well as those involved in intergovernmental relations that could broker the necessary agreements. Additionally, the federal government can play an important role in facilitating and incentivizing this policy dynamic through preemption/ supplantation. However, the implementation of the OZG, while still on-going, also highlights some of the limitations of this sharing-based policy dynamic, which could be relevant for understanding how the EDD can be made a success.