The malleability of preferences for centralisation: The influence of arguments and identities

Existing research shows that citizens are not particularly well-informed about the federal division of powers and that their attitudes can be inconsistent (Fafard et al. 2010, Henderson et al. 2013, McGrane/Berdahl 2020). The specific conditions under which citizens express different attitudes to federalism have not yet been investigated thoroughly, however. In particular, the question arises as to what extent and under which conditions citizens resist the centralisation proposals that are repeatedly voiced in debates about governance reforms (during the current Covid-19 crisis, for instance). We address these issues with the help of a vignette experiment implemented in an online survey among citizens in Germany that will be conducted within the framework of a research project on attitudes towards federalism in Germany and Switzerland. We ask respondents to evaluate reform proposals on four issues (e.g. education policy and anti-pandemic measures) that would involve a shift of responsibility from the regional to the national level. We focus on the effect of key arguments highlighting the pros and cons of federalism on preferences for these reform proposals. As questions of multi-level governance are generally not very salient for citizens, we expect that arguments will have a considerable influence on citizens’ preferences for centralisation. We will also test how a strong regional identity affects the processing of arguments on the pros and cons of federalism: based on the literature about motivated reasoning we expect that citizens employ strategies of selecting and interpreting information that ensure that arguments correspond to their prior beliefs (Taber & Lodge 2006). Hence, we expect individuals with strong regional identities to give more weight to arguments against centralisation. Conversely, we expect motivated reasoning to disappear when citizens’ regional identity is weak.