Divergence and convergence of policy priorities among sub-national units in federal systems: the cases of Canada and Spain

Abstract

The study of policy dynamics at the sub-national level in federal systems is getting growing attention by scholars of comparative politics and agenda- setting. These studies analyze to what extent the political agendas of regional governments are converging or diverging over time, focusing on: institutional factors (e.g., formal rules defining issue jurisdiction, type of government, intergovernmental arrangements), preferences (mostly of political parties), and agenda capacity (Hooghe et al. 2008). This constitutes an important change from previous analysis on comparative federalism, which traditionally focused on institutions as explanatory variable, providing a static outlook on the vertical distribution of authority between levels of government (Wibbels 2003). It also constitutes an important change in relation to another set of studies (Filippov et al. 2004; Wibbels 2006; Aldrich 1995) that pay attention to party politics and policy preferences, but still deal mainly with the relationship between the national and regional governments as a whole (e.g., Constantelos 2010). Finally, analyses of issue prioritization at the sub-national level (and the relations with the national and supranational level of governance) also make a ontribution to the policy [...].