ABSTRACT:
The regional level in many democracies has been strengthened over the last decades. Accordingly, the federalism reform of 2006 provided the German Länder with several additional legislative competences and thereby created space to conduct different public policies. While Germany has followed the path of homogenous policy outcomes for decades and was thus called ‚unitary federal state‘, with the reunification of 1990, socioeconomic and political differences between the Länder grew substantially. This raises the question, if and how this intensified territorial diversity affects the policy output of the Länder.
 

In my thesis I analyse which impact the Federalism Reform had on regional policy-making. The main part of the presentation will illustrate results of a common research project together with Stephan Vogel (CGS). Based on a comprehensive database covering all new fields of competence between 2006 and 2013, we examine the legislative activities of all Länder. As a first step we develop indexes for each field of competence to capture variance regarding the Länder laws. We find interesting differences both between fields of competence and the Länder. The new scope was partly used for diverging regulations, while in other fields we find continuing uniformity. We then conduct different analyses to
explain the differences between the Länder laws.