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regional executives and led by the
Lander Ministerpr asidenten
(Gunlicks
2003
).
As opposed to the U.S. Senate, the number of representatives per region is a
function of the number of inhabitants.
This design was directly intended to foster cooperation and stability between
the different units of the federation. After Weimar's experience, perceived as
overcentralized, the dominant viewwas that the new constitution should ensure
that different levels of government cooperate in the design and implementa-
tion of any given program. The alternative design, allocating full and exclu-
sive responsibilities to specific levels of government was thought to facilitate
institutional conflict and ultimately political instability (Jeffery and Savigear
1991
; Lehmbruch
1990
: 462-486). The idea of “cooperation” permeated the
design of public policies as well in such a way that it is very hard for citizens
to attribute responsibilities for policy outcomes to a particular level of gov-
ernment. This procedure breeds consensus and prevents innovation (Scharpf
1988
). In turn, this form of cooperative federalism bears important implica-
tions on the behavior of political parties and regional incumbents (Rodden
2006
; Schmidt
2003
). The importance of the Bundesrat in the legislative pro-
cess demands that national parties coordinate their regional leaders to pass
any major piece of legislation. To act as potential veto players in the Bun-
desrat, parties must first coordinate across l ander (Saalfeld
2002
). Thus, when
a piece of legislation is discussed in the Budestag, national party elites are at the
same time coordinating their strategies with “their” regional incumbents, rep-
resented in the Bundesrat. In turn, the behavior of regional leaders in office, but
most importantly in the upper chamber, may condition the electoral chances
of parties in federal elections. As a result, national parties have little incen-
tive to support rent-seeking behavior on the part of their regional elites. The
electoral costs for doing that might be politically devastating. Under these cir-
cumstances, party labels and organizations become ever more important for
regional incumbents to win office. In sum, the shadow of Weimar was very
much present in the design of political representation in the 1949 Constitu-
tion, yielding a highly centripetal political system. Such a system, combined
with the unexpected process of Reunification, provides a natural experiment
that allows us to observe how unions with centripetal systems of political rep-
resentation respond to sudden transformations in their economic geography.
The German case complements the natural experiment created by the Great
Depression by broadening the range of systems of representation subject to
exogenous economic pressures.
SUMMARY: EMPIRICAL STRATEGY AND HYPOTHESIS TESTING
The chapters that follow turn to study the politics of fiscal structures in the
five unions included in
Table 3.1
.
Chapter 4
analyzes the distributive conflicts
over fiscal structures throughout the history of the European Union. Chapter 5
focuses on the reaction of Canada and the United States to the Great Depres-
sion in the realm of unemployment insurance. I concentrate on unemployment
