Why federalism matters: policy feedback, institutional variation and the politics of trade policy-making in Canada and Germany
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Sub-federal units in federal systems increasingly participate in international trade policy-making, a domain that historically represents an exclusive jurisdiction of the federal level. A first strand of research emphasised exogenous factors, most notably the changing scope and depth of trade agreements and social contestation, to explain this trend. This study, by contrast, contributes to more recent efforts that focus on endogenous factors to elucidate variation in terms of how and with what implications sub-federal units have entrenched themselves in trade policy governance. The paper makes two contributions. First, it introduces a new theoretical argument suggesting that ideational and institutional feedback effects can explain variation in sub-federal trade policy-making. Second, the paper tests this framework by using two contrasting cases of federalism: Canada and Germany. The study shows that in Canada intergovernmental institutions facilitating sub-federal participation in trade policy-making had to be created through layering, while in Germany existing institutions were activated through conversion. Although both patterns of institutional change have empowered sub-federal units, they differ in terms of their robustness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".