Issue Matters: Public Preferences for Territorial Scales Across Policy Areas

Although previous studies have often investigated support for or opposition to (de)centralisation, debates about 'who should do what' unfold in specific policy areas. While previous studies have investigated support for or opposition to (de)centralisation, debates about 'who should do what' unfold in specific policy areas. This paper argues that issues influence public preferences regarding the territorial scale of policymaking. Drawing on research into multilevel governance and regional mobilisation, we propose a theory of how citizens' perceptions of the importance, complexity and satisfaction with current policies shape demands for regional versus national authority. We hypothesise that important issues foster regionalisation, complex issues foster (inter)nationalisation, and dissatisfaction with policy performance pushes responsibilities upwards to the national level. Furthermore, we posit that these issue effects are conditioned by ideology, identity, and trust. Empirically, we draw on original survey data from the AttFed project in Germany and Switzerland (N = 5,836). Respondents were asked which level of government should primarily be responsible for decisions relating to the environment, health, education, and agriculture, and were asked to choose between different constellations of regional, national, and European authority. For each policy area, respondents also rated its importance and perceived complexity, as well as their satisfaction with the current handling of the policy area. We estimated multilevel ordered logistic models with respondents nested within Länder/Kantons, controlling for socio-economic characteristics, left–right self-placement, territorial identity, and relative trust in regional versus national government. The results show that issue perceptions matter, but in highly issue-specific ways. Perceived complexity is generally associated with a preference for higher-level responsibility, particularly with regard to the environment and agriculture, whereas satisfaction tends to reduce demands for changes to the existing allocation of authority across most policy areas. In contrast, the effect of issue importance is less consistent and often dependent on ideology. For environmental policy, for instance, respondents on the left only support greater national responsibility when they deem the issue to be of high importance. Secondly, these issue-specific effects coexist with the strong and robust contributions of ideology, identity and trust. More conservative and regionally attached respondents favour greater regional control, whereas those who trust the national level more are more willing to centralise authority there. Overall, our findings suggest that citizens do not hold a single, domain-general preference for (de)centralisation. Instead, they form issue-specific territorial preferences that reflect how they view particular policies and their relationship with territorial communities and institutions. Conceptually, this requires an understanding of multilevel governance from the bottom up as a configuration of policy-specific public mandates. In terms of norms and practicalities, our findings suggest that debates on federal reforms and the reallocation of competences should pay close attention to how different policy areas are perceived, rather than treating territorial scales as a simple 'roller coaster' of more or less centralisation.