Policy Making In Multilevel Systems Federalism Decentralisation And Performance In The Oecd Countries

So far, we know relatively little about the effects of different varieties of the territorial organization of politics on policy making and policy outputs. Starting from the hypothesis that decentralized policy making has positive effects whereas federalism has a slightly negative impact on policy performance, this book systematically tests the independent and interdependent effects of different combinations of federal/unitary and decentralized/centralized structures of decision making and implementation. Based on a mixed methods design it first quantitatively tests the relationships for the OECD countries in cross-sectional as well as panel designs. In a second step, qualitative case studies are conducted for four countries: federal-centralized Austria, federal-decentralized Switzerland, unitary-decentralized Denmark, and unitary-centralized Ireland. The authors study two space-related policy areas, both with regard to the decision making and the implementation stage of the policy making process: regional economic policy and transport policy.