Solving the Gordian Knot: The Federalism Commission and the Reform of the Federal System in Germany.

How do the fundamental institutional rules of a political system evolve or change? When can they be altered, and by whom? Basic constitutional rules like federalism belong to the meta-rules that structure the political game in advanced democracies. As such they are hard to change because they usually are subject to large set-up costs, involve multiple constituencies, and are conditioned by the entrenched interests of a variety of powerful key actors. The (failed) reforms of a federal system thus present opportunities to examine whether and how the basic rules of the game can be changed.Theories about constitutional and institutional change can be divided into normative, interest-based, and non-rational explanations. They fit quite neatly into current divisions within the new institutionalism in political science, between historical-institutionalism, rational choice and sociological institutionalism (Hall and Taylor 1996). Historical-institutional explanations emphasize path dependence, stickiness, and "lock-in" effects, whereas rational choice underscores the contested nature of institutional development and the distribution of power and strategic interactions of key actors in society. Sociological explanations highlight the non-rational effects of political discourse and the impact of the recognition heuristic (Immergut 2006).After German unification and the creation of the European Union in the early 1990s, federalism became widely regarded as at least partially responsible for the German "Reformstau" or "reform gridlock". This paper briefly examines the evolution and the repeated efforts to reform the federal system of (West) Germany. The main focus is on the work of the "Federalism Commission" from 2003 to 2004 and the final adoption of its proposals to reform the German federal system in May 2006. Utilizing historical-institutional, rational, and sociological explanations, the paper will assess whether the changes of federalism in Germany represent primarily the (un-)intended consequences of prior normative commitments and path-dependent development of institutions, whether they are the results of deliberate choices and self-interested utility maximization of powerful key actors in German politics and society, or whether they are the non-rational outcomes of political discourse, cognitive framing and recognition heuristics among decision makers, or perhaps a combination of all three. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]