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political life span for reasons that, again, lend strong support to the argu-
ment of this topic. To put it shortly, the structure of incentives emerging from
centripetal representation constrained the proposal's support even within the
CSU/CDU itself. As Ziblatt's (
2002
) tracing of the process reveals, the pro-
posal met the resistance not only of the SPD representatives, but also of those
party officials representing the CSU at the federal level. Those members of the
party with the task of representing Bavaria at the national level could hardly
bear the thought of defending a proposal that virtually everyone else in the
party and the country would regard as selfish, parochial populism. Accord-
ingly, Ziblatt (
2002
) reports, “it can be argued that the formal institutional
constraint in the Bundesrat resulted in the loss of enthusiasm by the Bavarian
Minister President for this most radical component of the competitive feder-
alism agenda” (639). In line with the predictions of the model in
Chapter 2
(hypothesis 2), centripetal representation constrained rather directly Bavaria's
attempt to decentralize unemployment insurance in the late 1990s.
Concerning interregional redistribution, FA was perceived again as a purely
distributive conflict between regions, and, just as before Reunification, the net
payers moved on to challenge the status quo (Renzsch
2001
). I have shown
above how the incorporation effort during 1991-1995 increased the level of
interregional redistribution. In turn,
Table 6.7
indicates how such levels remain
fairly stable over time. However, the transformation of the economic and polit-
ical context triggered new political initiatives to trim the scope of interregional
redistribution during the late 1990s. A bipartisan group of net contributors
(SPD: North Rhine Westfalia, Hesse; CDU: Bavaria, Baden-Wuerttemberg)
proposed a reform along three lines: 1) increasing tax autonomy by the l ander;
2) reducing the contribution to the fiscal equalization system (FA); and 3) reduc-
ing the level of overlapping jurisdictions and joint tasks, that is, increasing the
political and tax autonomy of the l ander. Despite the CSU's efforts to reach an
agreement with their (CDU-ruled) Eastern counterparts, the latter refused to
endorse a common proposal out of fear of “election time recriminations from
the PDS that the Eastern CDU government has “sold out” Eastern interests to
the rich Bavarians.” (Ziblatt
2002
: 644). The distributive incentives of net win-
ners, a majority in the Bundesrat, and their electoral constraints, motivated by
the regionalization of party competition during the 1990s, ultimately derailed
the proposal. Again, in a centripetal system of representation, the CSU finds it
unfeasible to overcome the resistance of those states benefiting from the status
quo.
Aware of the political limitations imposed by the centripetal nature of
German federal institutions, Western net payers adopted a different strategy
and challenged the system before the German constitutional court (Scharpf
2007
). In 1997 the three biggest financiers of the FA, Bavaria (CSU), Baden-
Wurttemberg (CDU) and Hesse (SPD), filed a suit against the existing system
at the constitutional court of Germany. Their grounds were that, under the
procedures and percentage points set for equalization, some of the net recip-
ients were actually better off in the end than some of the net contributors
