Patterns of law-making in Germany's multi-level system

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Christian Stecker
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2015 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 290212666

Law-making processes highlight central characteristics of democratic systems such as the issue attention of political actors, the nature of political conflicts and the inclusiveness of decision-making. Moreover, duration and structure of law-making processes are important indicators of efficiency and effectiveness. While numerous studies have investigated these aspects with regard to law-making at the federal level in Germany, we lack comparable knowledge about law-making at the Länder level. Without this knowledge, however, our understanding of politics in Germany's multi-level system remains incomplete. The envisaged project aims at filling this gap. Using computer scripts it will collect complete data on the content, structure and decision-making of all bills in the legislative process of all 16 Länder between 1990 and 2014. It will describe existing variations and explain occurring legislative patterns. In explaining patterns of law-making the project focuses on how three important interactions influence legislation at the state level: interaction within the government (coalition politics), interaction between government and opposition and interaction between federal and state level. More precisely, the following questions will guide the study: How does the heterogeneity within the government and between government and opposition influence the structure (i.e. begin, duration, result) of legislation? How inclusive are law-making coalitions at the Länder level and which conflicts do they reflect? How do different government compositions between federal and Länder level impact on state legislation? Three contributions of the project deserve highlighting: First the project fills the still existing gap in the documentation of Länder legislation which will enable scholars to address many questions beyond the envisaged project. Second, it will provide new insights into the patterns of democracy of the German Länder, their coalition politics and government-opposition relations. Moreover, explicitly studying multi-level effects on legislation will help assess the performance of the German federalism. Third the insights generated by the project will also be of interest to international political scientists. This is because, as most similar systems, the Länder offer excellent conditions for controlled comparison and the inference of robust causal conclusions.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants