Charlie Jeffery

Sub-National Mobilization and European Integration: Does it Make any Difference?

Work on multi-level governance has refashioned conceptions in politicalscience of EU politics and policy-making, giving due weight for the first timeto the importance of sub-national actors. This article builds on the pioneeringcontributions on multi-level governance by Gary Marks and others to developa framework for analysis rooted in the functions of sub-national authorities intheir domestic political contexts. This domestic politics approach to multi-level governance is then developed, through consideration of a series ofvariables, to address a question which has rarely been posed hitherto: do theEU-focused activities of sub-national governments actually make any differencein the structure of authoritative decision-making in the EU?

Regional policy variation in Germany: the diversity of living conditions in a ‘unitary federal state’

ABSTRACT The German federal system is conventionally understood as highly co-ordinated between federal and regional governments and aimed at producing a ‘uniformity’ of living conditions. This view has increasingly been challenged as new work focuses on innovation and diversity at the regional level, and also as a consequence of reforms to the federal system that took place in 2006. This contribution attempts to establish a more systematic basis for assessing and explaining the scope and significance of regional policy variation in Germany. Our findings suggest that – despite institutional structures that foster intense co-ordination between central and regional governments and apparent popular preferences for uniformity of policy outcomes – the extent of policy variation in Germany is much greater than conventionally understood and driven both by structural factors and partisan choices at the regional level.

England, Englishness and Brexit

In the 1975 referendum England provided the strongest support for European integration, with a much smaller margin for membership in Scotland and Northern Ireland. By 2015 the rank order of ‘national’ attitudes to European integration had reversed. Now, England is the UKs most eurosceptic nation and may vote ‘Leave’, while Scotland seems set to generate a clear margin for ‘Remain’. The UK as a whole is a Brexit marginal. To understand the campaign, we need to make sense of the dynamics of public attitudes in each nation. We take an ‘archaeological’ approach to a limited evidence-base, to trace the development of attitudes to Europe in England since 1975. We find evidence of a link between English nationalism and euroscepticism. Whatever the result in 2016, contrasting outcomes in England and Scotland will exacerbate tensions in the UKs territorial constitution and could lead to the break-up of Britain.

The Non‐Reform of the German Federal System after Unification

This article discusses the implications for the German federal system of incorporating the new Lander of eastern Germany following German unification in 1990. It begins by examining the relationships between federation and Laander — commonly termed ‘cooperative’ federalism — which developed in the Federal Republic after its foundation. It then discusses how the integration of the new Lander in the east has added to and seriously exacerbated a range of tensions which had begun to emerge in ‘cooperative’ federalism prior to 1990, before moving on to outline the Lander contribution to the debate on reforming the federal system which was made possible under the terms of unification. This debate was, it is argued, an opportunity missed by the Lander — or, more precisely, was one they were incapable of taking ‐ to shore up and strengthen their position as an effective counterbalance to the federation in united Germany.

New Research Agendas on Regional Party Competition

Stateless nationalist and regionalist parties are no longer niche players but part of the mainstream of west European party politics. Yet their significance has yet to penetrate the mainstream of scholarship in political science on parties and elections. This contribution explores why this is so, focusing on a pattern of methodological and geographical fragmentation of research on sub-state party competition which has limited the resonance of that research. But it also sets out areas where this is changing—most notably in the growing combination of sociological and institutional approaches, but also in the study of stateless nationalist and regionalist parties as parties of government, often challenging, at times partnering state-wide parties. The resulting intersection of state-wide and sub-state logics of party competition suggests an opportunity for rethinking what ‘mainstream’ means in understanding party competition in multi-level states.

Devolution and Social Citizenship: Which Society, Whose Citizenship?

Much ink has been spilt over the question of how far decentralized government and the kinds of social policy that (most) western democracies developed after the Second World War are compatible. At the heart of the debate is the cliched, but still relevant, juxtaposition of “uniformity” and “diversity.” The social policy aims that underlay the development of postwar welfare states emphasized “uniformity.” All citizens were to enjoy uniform, equitable access to core public services such as health, education and social security irrespective of personal circumstances or place of residence. This aspiration informed T. H. Marshall’s (1992 [19501) conception of “social citizenship” which was articulated amid the ambitious expansion of British welfare state programs after the Second World War. Citizens were no longer to benefit just from uniform civil and political rights as a result of their membership of a particular state, but from uniform social rights too.

Balancing Territorial Politics and Social Citizenship in Germany and Britain: Constraints in Public Opinion

This contribution explores the tensions between the established expectations for a uniform delivery of welfare provisions and the growing demands for diversity of provisions in devolved or federal states. Using opinion poll evidence, it examines these tensions in the UK and Germany, arguing that a convergence in these challenges to established statehood appears to be in evidence.

Regions and the constitution for Europe: German and British impacts

Regions have attempted to influence the emerging constitutional order of the EU for around 20 years. The German Länder have made a particular impact in sensitising the Union to regional concerns at successive Intergovernmental Conferences since Maastricht. They were also the leading regional voice in shaping debates at the Convention on the Future of Europe, though the Scottish government also succeeded in leaving an imprint on the Constitution for Europe. This article contrasts the different understandings in Germany and Scotland of how regions should make their interests felt. The German Länder have opted for a strategy focused heavily on using the structure of the member state to limit EU regulation of their fields of competence, while the Scottish government developed a more open-ended and flexible strategy based also in constructive engagement beyond the member state at the EU level. In the light of the Scottish approach the article questions whether the Länder strategy is too one-dimensional, leaving them over-dependent on the German federal government.

Editorial: Towards a Regional Political Science

This special issue challenges the tendency within political science to focus on the nation-state as the main unit of analysis in studying social and political life, and, in consequence, to neglect ...

Groundhog Day: The Non-Reform of German Federalism, Again

Germany is now witnessing the fifth in a series of set-piece negotiations on the reform of the federal system since 1990. Like the other points in the series, it is unlikely that significant reform will follow. This persistent pattern of non-reform reflects in part the difficulty of disentangling a system based on high consensus requirements between federal and regional governments through negotiations based on similarly high consensus requirements. More fundamentally it reflects the power of a unitarist conception of federalism in Germany. This conception is periodically challenged, but has not yet been overcome, by ‘territorialising’ pressures from elites and citizens in some German Länder. These territorialising pressures appear persistent and are likely in due course to bring a further iteration – another ‘groundhog day’ – in the eternal German federalism reform debate.