Decentralising Policy Responsibility and Political Authority in Germany

This book provides an account of the reforms undertaken in German federalism throughout the 2000's. It explores the consequences of the historic changes made to the German federal order through detailed analysis of a set of unique case study areas. It also evaluates the handling of the Covid-19 pandemic on German federalism, and the relationship between party politics and federalism in Germany. The authors investigate what happens when policy responsibility is decentralized. The reforms undertaken in Germany fundamentally altered the roles played by the federal and state-level governments in several policy fields, and the question as to what kind of impact this has for policy itself is a global one. In a world that sees an increasing trend towards the decentralization of political authority, this book offers insights and lessons that have a practical application on a global scale. It will find the interest of students and scholars in countries worldwide which are grappling with the nature of policy responsibility across levels of political authority.

Carolyn Rowe is Reader in Politics at Aston University, UK, where she is also Co-Director of the Aston Centre for Europe (ACE). Her research interests are in issues of federalism, decentralisation, and the politics of territory in Europe. She has recently completed a DAAD-funded investigation (with Dr Ed Turner) into the new dimensions of German federalism and is author of the 2011 monograph Regional Representations in the European Union: Between Diplomacy and Interest Representation (Palgrave). Her research activities are tweeted through the ACE twitter feed, @Aston_ACE and on the ACE Facebook page.

Ed Turner is Reader in Politics and International Relations at Aston University, UK, is Co-Director of the Aston Centre for Europe (ACE) and is acting chair of the International Association for the Study of German Politics (IASGP). He is author of Political Parties and Public Policy in the German Länder (Palgrave, 2011), as well as editor, with Simon Green, of The Transformation of Germany's CDU (2014), and numerous other papers on German political parties and federalism, and he is currently working on a study of Germany's Social Democratic Party.