Abstract
Ed Turner's excellent book has, at its heart, the old question of whether political parties actually matter with regard to public policy development. In addressing this subject, his research looks to fill two significant gaps in the existing literature. First, there is the dearth of qualitative research into the influence of parties on public policy. The majority of analyses are quantitative and focus only on expenditure, yet Turner's analysis identifies significant qualitative differences between the preferences of political partisans unrelated to levels of state expenditure which such approaches would miss. Second, such analyses tend to focus only on the nationstate level. Turner's research, with its titular focus upon Political Parties and Public Policy in the German Länder, is thus a welcome consideration of the sub-national level in the assessment of partisan influence.
The analysis itself focuses upon such influence with regard to three policy areas – education, family and childcare, and labour market policies – viewed comparatively across three German Länder – Hesse, Saarland and Saxony-Anhalt – each of which demonstrated swings to the right during the period of the national Red/Green coalition government, thereby providing the opportunity for sub-national policy differentiation from the centre. The author's conclusion, based on these nine case studies, is that parties do indeed demonstrably matter at a Land level, albeit with significant variations in the extent to which this is the case: other factors including the character of the Land-level party (Landesverband), the socio-economic character of the Land and the history of policies pursued all temper the impact of a change in government on public policy.
Although specifically focused on the German case, the demonstration that the partisan composition of governments influences pursued policies suggests that more widely researched ‘accounts of public policy which neglect partisan influences … risk failing to capture an important point’ (p. 227). It also, obviously, confirms the view that federalism can enable diversity in policy choices – not simply in terms of technocratic policy practice, but also partisan, political ideology whereby sub-national legislatures act as ‘laboratories of social democracy’ and ‘laboratories of conservatism’, etc. (p. 14).
This book will be of genuine value to those interested in the study of federalism, the role of (multi-level) parties in policy making, multi-level politics in general and German studies specifically. It is a shame that the price is so high – a cheaper paperback version could find a key place as recommended reading on a number of diverse courses.