Making Federalism More Efficient: A Comparative Assessment
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Making Federalism More Efficient: A Comparative Assessment Dietmar Braun Institut d’Etudes Politiques et Internationales, Universite´ de Lausanne, Anthropole, Lausanne CH-1015, Switzerland. E-mail: [email protected]
It is assumed in this article that the recent reform wave in federal countries has been influenced and facilitated by efficiency considerations. Reform processes in five federal countries — Australia, Austria, Canada, Germany, and Switzerland — belonging to two distinct types of federalism (power separation and power sharing) are analysed. It is asked whether efficiency considerations have led to a convergence process in the federal organization and intergovernmental relations of such distinct types. It turns out, first, that efficiency has indeed been a major point of reference for the design of reforms in all five federal countries and, second, that though one finds similarities in reforming the federal organization and intergovernmental relations, the differences between power separation and power-sharing federal countries continue to play a role. Acta Politica (2008) 43, 4–25. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500210 Keywords: federalism; efficiency; new public management; comparative study
Introduction Federal countries, like all other OECD countries, have been under strain during the last 15 years or so because of soaring budget deficits and globalization pressures. This has led to a number of reforms or reform attempts reorganizing the way policy competencies are distributed, revenues are shared, policy strategies are developed, and democratic accountability is incorporated. Despite the obvious differences in the outlook of reforms, efficiency considerations based on new public management ideas as well as on the economic theory of federalism, seem to have inspired policy-makers about the ways and means to revise federal governance and public service delivery. Although most political scientists are aware that new public management has brought fundamental changes to the delivery of public services and the organization of public bureaucracy in general, there are almost no studies from a comparative perspective that endeavour to discuss the influence of this framework and how its main objective, efficiency, has changed the working of federalism, though some case studies of individual countries deal with the influence of new
Dietmar Braun Making Federalism More Efficient
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public management on federal organization1 in general and intergovernmental relations2 in particular.3 The pertinence of efficiency as a point of reference in recent federal reforms is the point of interest in this article. Usually, one distinguishes between different types of federalism, in particular between a ‘dual type of federalism’ or ‘separate jurisdictions’ (Wheare, 1967, 139) on the one hand, and ‘shared jurisdictions’ (Elazar, 1962) on the other. Bo¨rzel and Hosli (2003) speak — and we will use this expression — of the ‘power separation’ and the ‘power-sharing’ type. Most of the time, this distinction is based on the way to
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