Intergovernmental Meetings and Central Government Policymaking in Federal, Regionalized, and Unitary-Decentralized Countries

According to the Regional Authority Index (RAI), intergovernmental meetings occur in many federal, regionalized, and unitary-decentralized countries to facilitate participation of lower-tier governments in central government policymaking—an important aspect of what the creators of the RAI refer to as the "shared rule" dimension of regional authority. While some intergovernmental meetings have legally binding authority, others focus on information exchange and consultation. A nascent literature on intergovernmental relations in federations and regionalized countries (e.g., Poirier/Saunders 2015; Behnke/Mueller 2017; Schnabel 2020) highlights the importance of such meetings for the operation of federal and regionalized systems. The RAI suggests that they can also play a role in unitary-decentralized settings. The paper seeks to generate insights beyond the RAI’s assessment of whether meetings occur and whether they have legally binding authority by mapping and comparing different provisions and practices through which (vertical or horizontal) intergovernmental meetings in Eastern and Western European countries allow for participation of lower-tier governments in central government policymaking. It offers insights on the degree of formalization and bindingness of those mechanisms and highlights differences and similarities between federal and non-federal countries.