Making Sense of Federalism: Insights from an Open-ended Survey Question

We still know relatively little about public understanding of federalism, although this is a crucial element for the legitimacy of multilevel governance in European countries. Existing studies on attitudes to federalism are mainly based on standardized questions measuring opinions about different elements of a federal architecture, and policy-specific attitudes (e.g. Brown, 2013; Rendleman & Rogowski, 2022; Schakel & Smith, 2022). They show that citizens are not particularly well-informed about the federal division of powers and that their attitudes may be inconsistent (Henderson et al. 2013; but see Schakel & Smith, 2022). Considering the highly abstract nature of the concept, it is not entirely clear what citizens actually understand by it and how results based on standardized questions should be interpreted. To address these problems, we examine the answers to an open-ended question about federalism (“What goes through your mind when you hear the term "federalism"?) from an online survey conducted among citizens in Germany in January 2023. According to our survey only 44 per cent of respondents express meaningful ideas about the term federalism. A correct understanding of the concept is more common among politically interested, educated, and left-leaning respondents. Our results illustrate that questions surveying attitudes toward federalism should be kept simple, with reference to respondents’ everyday lives, to reduce the risk of reporting non-attitudes.