Intergovernmental Conflict Research Articles

Immigration Policy Preferences in Six EU Countries: The Shadow of Intergovernmental Conflicts in Public Opinion

AbstractMigration politics in the European Union (EU) is highly conflictual. The Dublin framework produces, consolidates and constantly re‐enforces divides amongst the governments of EU member states. A prime example is the country‐of‐first‐entry principle, which sets countries at the external EU border against non‐border countries. We investigate whether evidence of these conflicts amongst governments also translate into cross‐national divides in public opinion. To this end, we separate EU countries along two lines, border versus non‐border and host versus non‐host countries, and derive policy positions for six member states with respect to four immigration policies. The analysis of original survey data shows that public opinion follows, as expected, the patterns of intergovernmental conflicts. That the public is, like the governments, divided along national lines highlights the dominance of intergovernmental conflict in EU migration politics. As long as this logic prevails, the potential for collective action in EU migration policy‐making remains narrow.

What Does the Public Think About State Government Preemption of Local Policymaking?

State preemption of local policymaking is an increasingly used political tool and source of intergovernmental conflict. While previous studies have examined the determinants and effects of preemption, to date no study has examined citizens’ attitudes and opinions about the practice. Using two original public opinion surveys, we find that support for preemption does not seem to be politically driven as there are no discernable partisan differences and citizens are no more likely to support preemption when their party controls state government. Instead, support for preemption appears to be tied to more general feelings about state government such as trust and perceived responsiveness to citizens. Moreover, when using a survey experiment that primes respondents with a concrete example of preemption—forbidding cities from raising their minimum wage—support for preemption falls. These findings provide important context about citizens’ attitudes toward an increasingly prominent tool of state governments.

Marine plastic management policy agenda-setting in China (1985–2021): The Multi-stage Streams Framework

Although numerous policies for mitigating marine plastic are now widely developing in the international community, describing and understanding the generation and implementation of policies is still a challenge. To illustrate the development of marine plastic management agenda-setting in China, this study modified the Multi-stage Streams Framework and used comprehensive operational variables to quantitate the problem, politics and policy streams in the policy evolution of marine plastic management in China from 1985 to 2021. The result shows that there is a significant gap of policy configuration between the central government and local governments on the policy field of prohibiting plastic usage and cleaning coastal areas, and the implementation discrepancy of local governments defeats the evolution of policy agenda on marine plastic management. Further analysis by the Multi-stage Streams Framework reveals that the government's attention to marine plastic has not been fully attracted because of inconspicuous conflicts and policy entrepreneurs' poor sensitivity to problems. This study indicates a necessity for further consideration of the adaptability of policy implementation by local governments, in order to mitigate the inconsistency of governance goals from intergovernmental conflicts in the evolution of the marine plastic policy agenda. The future promotion of ambitious marine plastic policies should diversify the identity of policy entrepreneurs to generate comprehensive policy recommendations supported by sufficient interdisciplinary researches. In general, this study provides the rationale for a comprehensive understanding of the plastic policy development in China and is beneficial for guiding policymakers to invest management resources to get the desired policy evolution.

Engaging Stakeholders During Intergovernmental Conflict: How Political Attributions Shape Stakeholder Engagement

Engaging Stakeholders During Intergovernmental Conflict: How Political Attributions Shape Stakeholder Engagement

Making EU refugee policy in 2001, applying it in 2022: Directive 2001/55/EC and its use in 2022

AbstractThe Ukraine crisis brings European Union (EU) refugee policy into the spotlight. Temporary protection for Ukrainian refugees was granted under Directive 2001/55/EC—a directive that had never been applied until 2022. This article seeks to explain why a directive that had not been used for 20 years was now applied. Our argument rests on liberal intergovernmentalism: Conflicts between countries with high and low migration pressure dominated negotiations in the Council of Ministers. These intergovernmental conflicts were not solved but built into the wording of the Directive. Each attempt to apply the Directive triggered a new round of intergovernmental conflict. However, in the Ukraine crisis, the cost–benefit calculation of the countries that had hitherto opposed application of the Directive changed, because they received most of the refugees. Hence, a policy window opened, and the Commission could use old ‘dormant’ legislation to further integration.

Unitarian Illusion in Peru: Recentralization and Intergovernmental Conflicts from the Perspective of Local Governments

Unitarian Illusion in Peru: Recentralization and Intergovernmental Conflicts from the Perspective of Local Governments

County Immigration Enforcement in the Context of Unsettled Federalism: From Obama to Trump

We examine patterns of county participation in immigration enforcement across the Obama and Trump administrations and responses to the Trump administration’s efforts to mandate local compliance with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) directives. We focus on the policy that directly speaks to local discretion in enforcing federal law—namely, the willingness of local officials to render immigrant detainees to ICE. We find that underlying patterns of detainee transfers from counties to ICE were largely consistent between the Obama and Trump administrations. Nonetheless, the rate of detainee transfers increased during the Trump administration, an outcome associated with county support for Trump in the 2016 election. The findings suggest that partisanship is an entrenched source of diverging county enforcement practices, increasing intergovernmental conflict and undermining the “steam valve” potential of immigration federalism.

Recentralização, conflitos intergovernamentais e desigualdade territorial: perspectiva dos governos locais no Peru

Abstract Intergovernmental conflicts, in Latin America’s centralism and the recentralization in Peru, have been more acute over the last 30 years, producing sociopolitical, economic, and cultural problems at subnational levels. Based on the design of the grounded theory of Glasser and Strauss, this sociopolitical phenomenon is analyzed from the perspective of local governments in the Puno region to account for the emerging categories and subcategories of analysis regarding the dynamics of intergovernmental relations (IGR) in the local public policy process. The main argument is that, as a result of centralism, recentralization, and intergovernmental conflicts, territorial inequality reproduces and reinforces at the local level. These are expressed in a dichotomy between the deficit territorial dynamics (backward areas) and entrepreneurial territorial dynamics (growth areas).

Recentralization, intergovernmental conflicts and territorial inequality: perspective of local governments in Peru

Resumen Los conflictos intergubernamentales, en el contexto del centralismo Latinoamericano y la recentralización en el Perú, se han agudizado durante los últimos 30 años, produciendo diversos problemas sociopolíticos, económicos y culturales en los ámbitos subnacionales. Este fenómeno sociopolítico se analiza desde la perspectiva de los gobiernos locales en la región Puno, basado en el diseño de la Teoría Fundamentada de Glasser y Strauss, para dar cuenta de las categorías y subcategorías de análisis emergentes respecto de la dinámica de las relaciones intergubernamentales (RIG) en el proceso de las políticas públicas locales. El argumento principal es que, como resultado del centralismo, la recentralización y los conflictos intergubernamentales, se reproduce y se refuerza la desigualdad territorial en los ámbitos locales, expresada en una dicotomía entre: dinámicas territoriales deficitarias (zonas de atraso) y dinámicas territoriales emprendedoras (áreas de crecimiento).

Fragmentation and intergovernmental conflict during the Covid-19 crisis. The complex relationship between national and regional governments in Italy

ABSTRACT The outbreak of the Covid-19 crisis has triggered political tensions involving different levels of government. Italy constitutes a paradigmatic example of such problems. The powers assigned to regional presidents as a result of the dynamics of presidentialization make them key players in Italy’s fragmented multilevel system. The article aims to demonstrate that the conflict between national and regional governments during the pandemic has been based mainly on polity reasons, that is regional governments’ ambition to strengthen their autonomy, rather than on policy arguments. The Covid-19 crisis in Italy has taken the form of an intergovernmental conflict over the balance of authority between central and regional governments. This state of affairs has complicated the attempts at establishing a satisfactory level of coordination between the levels of government, has resulted in a fragmented response to the crisis, and has triggered a systemic conflict between levels of government.

Intergovernmental Conflict and Censorship: Evidence from China’s Anti-Corruption Campaign

Abstract I study how local Chinese newspapers report on the national anti-corruption campaign by collecting a large-scale dataset of newspaper articles, internet searches, and comments on social media. Despite greater reader interest, local newspapers underreport, and deemphasise corruption scandals involving high-level officials from their own province. Underreporting is greater when a corrupt official is well connected, and a newspaper does not rely on advertising revenue. City-level newspapers report less about corruption in their own city but are more likely to report about corruption within the provincial government. I present suggestive evidence that this type of localised censorship reduces the accountability of local governments.

Federalism and the politics of oil and gas pipelines in Canada (Alberta) and the United States (Texas)

AbstractIn recent years, pipeline policy has been a significant and controversial issue in Canadian politics. In the United States, pipeline projects to increase transportation capacity for Texas oil have also been high on the energy agenda, but they have not permeated national politics like in Canada. In fact, new pipelines to transport oil and gas out of Texas' Permian Basin have multiplied without generating serious national controversy or intergovernmental conflicts. This article develops an explanation for these distinct political outcomes in Canada and the United States. The article identifies three factors that have contributed to pipeline projects triggering serious intergovernmental conflicts in Canada around Alberta oil but not in the United States in relation to the transportation of Texas oil: (1) pipeline structures and the regulatory framework for oil and gas; (2) the ideological and political support for, or opposition to, oil and gas development; and (3) the level of Indigenous opposition to pipeline projects.Related ArticlesAsh, John S. 2011. “Radiation or Riots: Risk Perception in Nuclear Power Decision Making and Deliberative Approaches to Resolving Stakeholder Conflict.” Politics & Policy 39(2): 317–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2010.00237.x.Mahafza, Zachary, Jonathan M. Fisk, and David P. Adams. 2021. “Crude Contempt: Examining Local Pushback to Oil and Gas Development in California.” Politics & Policy 49(2): 479–501. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12401.Neill, Katharine A., and John C. Morris. 2012. “A Tangled Web of Principals and Agents: Examining the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill through a Principal‐Agent Lens.” Politics & Policy 40(4): 629–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1747‐1346.2012.00371.x.

When Time Matters: Federal Changes, Temporality and Recentralization in Brazil

ABSTRACT Much of the scholarly work on Brazilian federalism has long focused on the ways in which decentralization has produced institutional paralysis under intergovernmental conflict. This article, by contrast, suggests that Brazil has been under a gradual transformation since its democratization, which led to a recentralization of power in the hands of the federal government. It presents a framework that explains how an initial decentralization process (1983-1994) turned into a centralization process (1995-2007) that ultimately increased the regulatory and coordination powers of the Brazilian federal government. In addition, the analysis shows that two main blocs of political parties competed to influence the sequence and speed of legislation related to the decentralization and centralization processes. Specifically, these parties used two competing temporal strategies – foot-dragging and pace-setting – to slow down or accelerate the approval of legislation regulating subnational autonomy. Once the centralizing bloc of parties enacted key centralizing legislation, they used the strategy of fence-building to institutionalize intergovernmental relations, thereby consolidating the coordination powers of the center. The main contribution of this article is to advance a temporal approach to federal changes, which explains how the Brazilian federal government centralized authority under a decentralizing Constitution.

Failing forward in the Common Commercial Policy? Deep trade and the perennial question of EU competence

ABSTRACT The European Union’s (EU) Common Commercial Policy (CCP) is more fragile than the label ‘exclusive competence’ suggests. Ratification conflicts have increased since the 1980s and have further intensified in recent years. Simultaneously, the EU’s trade competence witnessed a progressive expansion in consecutive treaty reforms. In recourse to the ‘failing forward’ (Jones et al., 2016) argument, this paper argues that recurring failure and progressive integration have been equally constitutive elements in the CCP’s historical development. The substantive expansion of the international ‘deep trade’ agenda repeatedly laid bare the gaps in and fuelled intergovernmental conflict over the scope of the EU’s competences. Over time, these instabilities acted as a catalyst of integration, supporting supranational entrepreneurs’ quest for – and member state governments’ acceptance of – further yet ever-incomplete delegation. The paper thus demonstrates that, under certain conditions, the failing forward argument is applicable even to the EU’s historical core of regulatory market-making.

Explaining Intergovernmental Conflict in the COVID-19 Crisis: The United States, Canada, and Australia

The Covid-19 pandemic produced more significant immediate intergovernmental conflict in the U.S. than in Australia and Canada. This article considers three variables for this cross-national divergence: presidentialism versus parliamentarism; vertical party integration; and strength of intergovernmental arrangements. We find that the U.S. presidential system, contrary to parliamentarism in Canada and Australia, provided an opportunity for a populist outsider skeptical of experts to win the presidency and pursue a personalized style that favored intergovernmental conflict in times of crisis. Then, the intergovernmental conflict-inducing effect of the Trump presidency during the pandemic was compounded by the vertical integration of political parties, which provided incentives for the President to criticize Democratic governors and vice-versa. Third, the virtual absence of any structure for intergovernmental relations in the United States meant that, unlike Australian states and Canadian provinces, American states struggled to get the federal government’s attention and publicly deplored its lack of leadership.

Exploring the determinants of regional health governance modes in the Global South: A comparative analysis of Central and South America

AbstractWhat explains the variation in how states collectively deal with public health challenges across different regions? We tackle this puzzle by comparing the regional health governance efforts pursued within the Central American Integration System (SICA) and the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). We show that Central America's health governance has been driven by external actors, whereas South America's was driven by states within the region, and remained insulated from external actors’ influence. We argue that the explanation for such variation lies in the interplay of state capacity and regional leadership. In Central America, weak state capacity combined with the absence of a regional leader willing to provide governance resources. This opened up space for external actors to contribute actively to regional health governance, complementing the governance of Central American governments. In South America, Brazil's regional leadership mobilised neighbouring states’ capacities by promoting a South-South cooperation agenda based on intra-regional exchanges among national health bureaucracies, which, however, proved vulnerable to intergovernmental conflicts. Through the comparison of Central and South America, the article bridges the gap between global health governance scholarship and comparative regionalism, providing new insights on the determinants and effects of regional health governance modes in the Global South.

Theory and practice of “hybrid” confrontation: an overview of conflicts since the XV century to the present

The subject of this research is the indirect forms of confrontation in intergovernmental conflicts conflicts. The object of this research is the “hybrid warfare” as a form of indirect confrontation. It is established that currently the methods of military and nonmilitary intergovernmental confrontation are being extensively used. One of the actively implemented concepts is the so called “hybrid war”. The author examines the key components of “hybrid” actions; and leaning on the analysis of historical experience, concludes that these approaches have deep historical roots. The article reviews not the classical mercenarism, but namely “hybrid” actions, when the hirer and the purpose of involving mercenaries are hidden, while military actions are accompanied by economic confrontation and massive information attacks. The examples of such actions can be seen in wars back in the XV–XVII centuries. The analysis of warfare and armed conflicts experience allows concluding the threat of “hybrid” actions is extremely relevant now and in the foreseeable future. It is also worth noting that in the future, other “hybrid” approaches towards intergovernmental confrontation that have previously been used in the past can be modified to the new conditions of civilizational development.  The author concludes that Russia should be ready to counter such threats, and outlines possible aspects of such counteraction.

Pandemic Governance

The COVID-19 pandemic created an unprecedented need for governance by a multiplicity of authorities. The nature of the pandemic—globally communicable, uncontrolled, and initially mysterious—required a coordinated response to a common problem. But the pandemic was superimposed atop our decentralized domestic and international governance structures, and the result was devastating: the United States has a death rate that is eighteenth highest in the world, and the pandemic has had dramatically unequal impacts across the country. COVID-19’s effects have been particularly destructive for communities of color, women, and intersectional populations.This Article finds order in the chaos of the pandemic response by distilling a typology for the predominant intergovernmental relationships that emerged. Two of these behaviors describe intergovernmental conflict. Governments undermined each other by destabilizing and criticizing each other’s actions. They did so at all levels: up (when local governments undermined states), down (when the federal government undermined states), and across (when the federal government undermined itself). Governments abdicated responsibility when they failed to act. Two additional behaviors describe intergovernmental coordination. Governments collaborated when they actively worked together, both vertically and horizontally, to harmonize their policies. And they engaged in bandwagoning when they avoided taking initiative in making pandemic policy, opting instead to follow the leads of others. We argue that these behaviors were the predictable result of well-worn structural and political dynamics. Structurally, pandemic policy lies uncomfortably on two poles of the federal-state division of responsibilities. Ambiguous hierarchies and overlapping roles pushed governments toward conflict rather than coordination. Politically, intense partisanship transformed nearly every governance decision into symbolic, two-sided national battles. These battles provided a default set of relationships that became organizing principles for the pandemic response. We use these insights to sketch the contours of a way forward. To address the role confusion that arose from our multi-sovereigned system of governance, we propose a federal pandemic statute that emphasizes and balances role clarity, state independence, and explicit governmental action that disrupts inequality. To lessen the pull of partisanship, we advocate for the creation of decentralized but inclusive subject-matter networks among international, federal, state, and local authorities.

Two routes to precarious success: Australia, New Zealand, COVID-19 and the politics of crisis governance

Australia and New Zealand are routinely presented as sharing more in common than the federal and unitary systems separating them. As two modernising Antipodean settler societies, their governing trajectories have embraced waves of public administration/management reform. Shared pathways seem matched by their relative, although precarious and fragile, early successes in the crisis challenges of COVID-19. This article contextualises and examines one crucial point of separation: two very different crisis governance routes to such outcomes. Australia’s federal variant of multi-level governance, more used to addressing diverse regional challenges than shared national threats, has been characterised by an evolving balancing act of multi-jurisdictional agendas and bureaucratic–political conflicts. By contrast, New Zealand’s unitary system of governance, well-versed in the centralisation of power, has produced lower levels of intergovernmental conflict. Our analysis of these differing pathways also makes a contribution to our conceptual understanding of successful crisis governance.Points for practitionersAdministrative arrangements based around federal or unitary systems are both quite capable of contributing to successful outcomes. Essential for both are inclusive crisis discussions that are consistent with the norms of the respective systems. Success can be fragile, especially in a pandemic. Appropriate inclusive discussions can facilitate responses to cascading crisis developments and act as a safeguard against complacency.

Transnational governance in motion: Regional development banks, power politics, and the rise and fall of South America's infrastructure integration

AbstractUnder what conditions does one transnational governance mode evolve into another? Under what conditions does a transnational governance initiative break down? The article addresses these questions through the analysis of the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America (IIRSA), showing how delegation, orchestration, and intergovernmental (direct) governance can be linked to one another, creating a chain of governance modes in motion. By reconstructing IIRSA's trajectory, we illuminate the orchestrating role of regional development banks, and explore the conditions leading to the breakdown of transnational governance. The article contributes to the indirect governance literature by complementing prevailing functionalist accounts with a power‐based perspective that underlines the impact of intergovernmental conflicts and power asymmetries on transnational governance. The article also bridges the gap between the international relation governance scholarship and comparative regionalism, providing new insights on the logics of transnational governance in world regions characterized by limited state capacities.