Abstract translation
This article sheds light on the relationship between politicians and scientific advisors in the second stage of reform of Germany's fiscal federalism. Based on the principal agent theory and a specific model presented by Bueno de Mesquita we derive two hypotheses. Concretely, we expect that policy change depends on both the homogeneity of the experts’ signals (H1) and the strength of the experts’ signals independently of their preferred policies (H2). For an empirical investigation, we exploit a dataset that includes information about the status quo, the experts’ positions and the degree of policy change relating to 416 conflict issues. According to two separate questionnaires in the policy advisory process we differentiate between the fiscal reform in narrower sense and the administrative reform. Our findings show that H1 and H2 have explanatory power for the partly far-reaching fiscal reform, whereas only H1 explains the “fig leaf” of administrative reform.
