Federalism and citizen preferences: a vignette experiment on policy-making in Germany

In federal systems where multiple orders of government share authority, do citizens care about which order makes a policy? To investigate whether citizens place importance on the order of government and whether if they do, this reflects principled preferences or implicit assumptions about policy performance, we conducted a vignette experiment in Germany. The design of the study disentangles the effects of policy adoption and financing from the expected effectiveness of a policy and its impact on regional differences. Our findings show that citizens are largely indifferent regarding the order of government that adopts a policy, but they show a modest preference for financing by the federal government. These results suggest that previously observed preferences for federal policy-making in other studies may reflect citizens’ implicit assumptions about policy performance rather than principled support for centralization.