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Abstract
Germany’s federal states can enforce stricter regulations on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) than does the national government. Empirically, the study analyses two outcomes at the state level: the symbolic accession to the GMO-free network, in which regional units mobilise against the EU’s regulatory approach, and hard GMO policies/regulations. Besides focussing on political parties and environmental interest groups, the article provides various additional theoretical explanations for the variation in outcomes. The research questions are the following: what conditions a state’s accession to the GMO-free network? What conditions a state’s adoption of GMO regulations? To assess these questions, the study employs fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis. One finding is that the inclusion of the Green Party in government is not a predominant condition for the adoption of regulations, but ministers affiliated with the Greens are dominant drivers of symbolic policy-making. The study reveals differing regulatory action by CDU/CSU ministers in the western and eastern states, which can be explained by the differing interests of farmers. Other findings reveal that SPD ministers regulated GMOs to much the same extent as CDU/CSU or Green ministers. Environmental interest groups were also found to have positively conditioned symbolic policy-making, having no effect, however, on the adoption of concrete regulations.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Rebecca Abu Sharkh and Sarah May Hatch deserve credit for language-editing the manuscript and Felix Scholl for research assistance.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
SUPPLEMENTAL DATA AND RESEARCH MATERIALS
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2017.1397135.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Ulrich Hartung is a Doctoral Candidate at the Institute of Political Science at Heidelberg University, Germany. His research interests include comparative policy analysis, risk governance, and in particular the regulation of biotechnology in the EU multi-level system.
Felix Hörisch is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer in Political Science at Heidelberg University, Germany. His research interests include comparative policy analysis, political economy, the labour market, social and fiscal policies, political strategy, and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis.
Notes
1 These actors include farmers cultivating genetically modified (GM) crops, conventional and organic farmers, processors, the feed industry, livestock producers, the food industry, retailers and consumers (Joint Research Centre Citation2016, 20).
2 We conducted expert interviews with representatives of the GMO-competent ministries of the following states: Berlin, Bremen, Saarland, Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg and Thuringia. The ministries from the other states were not willing to participate in such interviews. All interviews can be requested from the corresponding author.
3 The section is limited to the most prominent regulatory aspects in Germany. For more comprehensive investigations, see Katzek (Citation2014), Cooper (Citation2009) and Boschert and Gill (Citation2005).
4 The requests submitted to the Commission, among others, referred to the GM maize varieties MON810 (Monsanto) (re-authorisation), TC 1507 (Pioneer Hi-Bred/Mycogen Seeds) and 1507×59122 (Dow AgroSciences) (see Commission Citation2017).
5 We did not take the varying distances into further account for the indexing. Rather, we calibrated according to the mere absence or presence of such bans around nature reserves.
6 Strøm (Citation1990) emphasised the uncertainty about which of the three factors is predominant for political parties’ positioning and policy-making on certain issues.
7 We also included the Liberal Party (FDP) and The Left (Die Linke) in the data set, however, these parties are not theorised here, as both are electorally less relevant compared to the other three parties.
8 As no appropriate data exists for GMO-friendly actor groups, we could not include these in the fsQCA.
9 We also asked Greenpeace for membership data, however they were not willing to provide such data.
10 Such plantings might have contradictory effects on regulations: On the one hand, they might provoke resistance by regional publics and various other actors. On the other hand, agbiotech companies, farmers and other food chain actors might advocate for a preservation of the regulatory status quo or for more permissive regulations. For these actors, regulations would mean considerable costs in respect of losses, whereas they would further benefit from the status quo or benefit even more from cutbacks on existing regulations (see e.g. Venus et al. Citation2017).
11 For all calculations, we used the fsQCA program (Ragin, Drass, and Davey Citation2006). Please keep in mind that * is the logical AND while + is the logical OR in fsQCA notation and ∼ marks the negated condition/outcome.
12 Concerning the threshold of consistency, we follow the suggestions of Schneider and Wagemann (Citation2012, 143) as well as Ragin (Citation2006) and apply a threshold of 0.9 for necessary conditions.
13 The first state which joined the network was Schleswig-Holstein in 2003. However, after changes in governments the state first abandoned the network in 2005 and then re-entered it in 2012.
14 For sufficient conditions, we take a two-step approach and implement a rather conservative threshold for consistency of 0.85 (marked bold) and a second threshold of 0.75 for sufficient conditions as suggested in the literature (see e.g. Schneider and Wagemann Citation2012, 279; in italics).
15 We do not display the results for the test for sufficient conditions for the combination of two or more conditions here due to the already very high number of single conditions being sufficient for the outcome.
16 Due to space constraints, we only display the parsimonious solution as well as the results for the positive outcome for all outcomes here. The results for the negated outcomes as well as for the complex and intermediate solution of the test of sufficiency for the outcome of a high GMO regulation index score are available in the online appendix.