Detecting Patterns of Territorial Organization in Administrative Practice: Practical Federalism as a New Policy Analysis Perspective

Understanding how the embedment of administrative actors within federal or unitary political systems affects the decision-making of these actors has been crucial for policy evaluation. However, the role of rules of territorial organization in day-to-day administrative routines has barely been researched, especially in comparative settings. Neither have impacts of such rules on policy effectiveness received enough attention. This paper introduces “practical” federalism as a novel policy analysis perspective and develops indicators on how to measure practical federalism. The perspective draws from the literature on multi-level administration, “dynamic” federalism and recent actor-centered advances in territorial politics. It represents a first answer to scholars looking to comparatively evaluate effects of state territorial organization on the effectiveness of outcomes of common or functionally equivalent sub-state policies. In line with classical conceptualizations, practical federalism suggests a novel, theory-based operationalization by investigating patterns of administrative coordination and independence, the two cornerstones of federalism, with analytical routines from a social network analysis. The implications of this new perspective are twofold: First, the development of indicators showing how rules of territorial organization are linked to administrative practice in selected policy-domains further enhances the understanding of territorial politics. Second, the detection of a set of institutional variables that may be used as independent variables for policy effectiveness evaluations in comparative settings redirects policy evaluators’ attention to factors of institutional embedment and supports them in gauging institutional effects.