Intergovernmental Cooperation
Rational Choices in Federal Systems and Beyond
ISBN13: 9780199570607ISBN10: 0199570604
Hardback,
272 pages
Sep 2009,
In Stock
Price:
$99.00 (06)Description
Over the past decades, governments have increasingly been confronted with problems that transcend their boundaries. A multitude of policy fields are affected, including environment, trade and security. Responding to the challenges triggered by Europeanization and globalization, governments increasingly interact across different spheres of authority. Both theoretically and empirically, the puzzle of institutional choice reflected by the variety of arrangements in which intergovernmental cooperation takes place inside individual countries and across their borders remains surprisingly under-explored. In an attempt to solve this puzzle, the book tackles the following questions: Why are the intergovernmental arrangements governments set up to deal with boundary-crossing problems so different? To what extent do these institutional differences affect the effectiveness of intergovernmental cooperation?To address this gap theoretically and empirically, this book adopts a deductive, rationalist approach to institution-building. It argues that internal politics, the type of executive-legislative relations within the interacting governments, explains the nature of institutions set up to channel intergovernmental processes: while power-sharing governments engage in institution-building, power-concentrating governments avoid it. It also shows that these institutional choices matter for the output of intergovernmental cooperation. The approach is applied to the United States, Canada, Switzerland, and finally the European Union. Disaggregating individual government units, the theoretical approach reveals how intragovernmental micro-incentives drive macro-dynamics and thereby addresses the neglect of horizontal dynamics in multilevel systems. The willingness and capacity of lower-level governments to solve collective problems on their own and to oppose central encroachment are crucial to understand the power distribution in different systems and their long-term evolutions.
Features
- Comprehensive comparative analysis of federal dynamics, intergovernmental institutions and their reform
- Innovative rationalist framework and broader contribution to institutionalist debates
- New insights into the challenges of multilevel policy coordination in federal systems and the European Union
About the Author(s)
Nicole Bolleyer is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Exeter. Her research focuses on comparative federalism as well as parties and party organization in Western democracies. Her work has been published in West European Politics, Political Studies, Publius: The Journal of Federalism and Regional and Federal Studies. She studied political science, German literature, linguistics and public law at the University of Mannheim (Germany) and at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. She was previously a Lecturer in Politics in Mannheim and has a PhD in political science from the European University Institute in Florence.
