Impediments to yardstick competition in federal systems: Experimental survey evidence from German politicians

A key argument for policy competition between sub-national entities is that direct comparison of policy outcomes yields efficient public service provision. However, the necessary condition to reap these efficiency gains – that voters can observe policy outcomes – is often not fulfilled. A case in point is the education system of Germany, where the legislative and executive power over public education is vested in the federal states, but regular cross-state comparative student assessment data is largely lacking. To study the underlying political-economy reasons for lacking comparability across states, we conduct parallel surveys among German state parliamentarians and German citizens.

To identify possible impediments to yardstick competition in the area of sub-national education policy, we analyze how important politicians consider the comparability of educational outcomes across states in comparison with citizens' opinion. Possible asymmetries in the answers are further studied by asking whether politicians undererestimate how important their electorate considers comparability. In a next step, we expect to show that politicians misperceive the relative performance of their state’s education system. Providing politicians with real performance information of their home state as compared to other states in Germany should then significantly increase the likelihood of legislators supporting the introduction of regular comparative student assessments across German states.

We elicit politicians’ preferences for comparability in a online survey targeted to all German state parlamentarians who are randomly assigned to one of two experimental groups. Respondents in group 1 state their support for comparability-enhancing policies without receiving any information. Respondents in group 2 answer the same questions after being informed about their state’s educational performance relative to the other German states, i.e. whether they are among the upper or lower half of the distribution of educational performance among all German states. Respondents in both experimental groups also can elicit whether they want to receive information on the public opinion on the matter of comparability-enhancing policies which we retrieve from a representative population survey fielded by the authors. The experimental results will shed light on the determinants of support among political legislators for enhanced comparative testing of education outcomes, which is a necessary condition to foster education-policy competition. We implemented a second, independently randomized, experiment when eliciting valuing the importance of comparability of educational outcomes across states. While a control group was not only asked about their own opinion related to this, the treatment group was asked about the average support for this from German citizens. This allows us to assess whether politicians consider voter support in their elicited support for comparability of education outcomes across German states.