Horizontal coordination in cooperative federalism: The purpose of ministerial conferences in Germany

ABSTRACT

Intergovernmental councils in Germany comprise 18 sectoral ministerial conferences and the prime ministerial conference as peak organization. They complement the Bundesrat as institutions of Intergovernmental Relations in the German system of cooperative federalism, dealing with matters of shared rule as well as self-rule. Based on expert interviews among ministerial bureaucrats, this contribution finds that contrary to conventional wisdom, vertical influence and autonomy protection are not their main purpose. Rather, they serve primarily information exchange and coordination. Still, the emphasis on either influence and autonomy protection or coordination and information as well as the directions of interaction vary across policy sectors. We further investigate constitutional allocation of power and party political composition as determinants on the specific purpose of ministerial conferences. The findings suggest that the allocation of power is more important than party political composition in explaining variation between sectoral ministerial conferences.

KEYWORDS:

• Intergovernmental relations
• cooperative federalism
• Germany
• shared rule/self-rule
• policy sectors

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for the time and information the interviewees were willing to share with us. The authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers as well as Sean Müller and Alan Fenna for their valuable feedback and comments. We very much benefited from the lively and constructive discussion at the authors’ workshop held in Bern in summer 2016 with further Ann Bowman, Nicola McEwen, John Phillimore, Johanna Schnabel and Julie Simmons.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We refer here to the notion of ‘policy sectors’ because we classify policies according to institutional structures that we find in departments, parliamentary committees or ministerial conferences (Pappi et al., 1995: 38). In this sense, the ministerial conferences of the Interior, for example, is regarded as the institutionalization of the policy sector of interior politics.

2. The party political spectrum in Germany from the left to the right is as follows: a post-socialist left party (Die Linke – the Left); a left-liberal environmental party (Bündnis90/ Die Grünen – the Greens); a traditional social-democratic people’s party (SPD); a traditional conservative Christian-democratic party (CDU; complemented by its Bavarian ‘sister party’, the Christian Social Union CSU which, despite its name, is more right wing conservative than the CDU); the liberal party (FDP – the Free Democrats); and several right-wing and protest parties which played to date however no lasting and relevant role at federal level, among which most recently the anti-European protest party Allianz für Deutschland (AFD – Alliance for Germany). These parties are in fact party families, that is, an association of the federal and sub-state organizations (Detterbeck and Renzsch, 2003).The German party system hence is vertically integrated, even though there are tendencies towards regional differences (Detterbeck, 2016), which however will be neglected in this analysis.

3. These were complemented by further interviews with a broader focus as well as in-depth research and analysis of all available information on the ministerial conferences, from the literature and websites of the conferences.

4. For a detailed account of the formal structure and working procedures of the ministerial conferences, see Hegele and Behnke (2013).

5. http://www.bundesrat.de/DE/dokumente/statistik/statistik-node.html [Accessed 8 July 2016].

6. This can be explained by the organizational closeness of the FMK to the finance committee of the Bundesrat.

7. This is called the ‘Länder formula’. If a decision is only taken by the Länder, the wording of the resolution is ‘the environmental senators and ministers of the Länder have decided’. If unanimity is reached with the federal level, then the wording is ‘the UMK has decided’ (IP 2, IP 6).