Unpacking multi-level governance. Evidence of distributive slippage and type III error from two process-tracing analyses

Multi-level governance is one of the most outstanding issues in political science. It is usually depicted as an effective way of designing policies, because of its capacity to incorporate heterogeneous information in policy making. However, the litera-ture has also warned against the coordination problems that can emerge because of the difficulty in satisfying divergent interests of the involved actors. This article aims at contributing to this debate by explaining two specific dynamics: the dis-tributive slippage in vertical governance and the type III error in horizontal gov-ernance. In order to address these issues,.process tracing has been applied to ana-lyze two design processes. The application of causal inference tests to the collect-ed evidence has allowed to significantly increase confidence in the two hypothe-sised inherent dynamics.