LEHRSTUHL FÜR EMPIRISCHE THEORIEN DER POLITIK
Geschwister-Scholl-Institut für Politikwissenschaft
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
Professor Knill Geschwister-Scholl-Institut für Politikwissenschaft an der LMU München

Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill

Chair and Professor View vita
Chair for Empirical Theory of Politics

About us

The main research areas of the chair are comparative public policy and public administration. In the field of public policy, we focus on the comparative analysis of policy change and government activity in various policy areas. Within the realm of comparative public administration, we scrutinize international public administrations, the repercussions of Europeanisation and internationalisation on national administrative systems, and the linkages between public administration and policy-making.

Carbon Footprint Policy

Policy
Change

Sustainabiltiy & Governance

Public Administration

Moral Policy

Data GSI München

Research & Data

The chair's research focuses on comparative public policy analysis and public administration. Current projects deal with the causes and consequences of policy accumulation (ACCUPOL), administrative styles in international public administrations (STYLES), and the participation of civil society actors in the implementation of moral policies (Religion & Morality Policy).

VERGANGENE FORSCHUNGSPROJEKTE

Publications

Recent Articles

Fernández-i-Marín, X., Knill, C., Steinbacher, C., & Zink, D. (2024). Tackling blind spots in Europeanisation research: the impact of EU legislation on national policy portfolios. Journal of European Public Policy, 1–29.

Steinbacher, C. (2024). The pursuit of welfare efficiency: when institutional structures turn ‘less’ into ‘more’. Policy Sciences, 1-26.

Steinbacher, C. (2024). The voice of implementation: Exploring the link between street‐level integration and sectoral policy outcomes. Regulation & Governance.

Fernández-i-Marín, X., Hinterleitner, M., Knill, C., & Steinebach, Y. (2024). Testing theories of policy growth: public demands, interest group politics, electoral competition, and institutional fragmentation. Journal of European Public Policy, 1-26.

Zink, D., Knill, C.. Steinebach Y. (2024). Bureaucratic overload and organizational policy triage: A comparative study of implementation agencies in five European countries. Regulation & Governance. Online First.

Knill, C., Steinebach, Y., & Zink, D. (2023). How policy growth affects policy implementation: bureaucratic overload and policy triage. Journal of European Public Policy. Online First.

Fernández-i-Marín, X., Knill, C., Steinbacher, C., & Steinebach, Y. (2023). Bureaucratic Quality and the Gap between Implementation Burden and Administrative Capacities. American Political Science Review, 1-21.

Books

Buchcover des Routledge Handbook of Environmental Policy
Routledge Handbook of Environmental Policy

Helge Jörgens, Christoph Knill & Yves Steinebach (2023)

Buchcover: International Public Administrations in Global Public Policy
International Public Administrations in Global Public Policy: Sources and Effects of Bureaucratic Influence

C. Knill & Y. Steinebach (2022)

Book: A matter of Style
A Matter of Style? Organizational Agency in Global Public Policy

Bayerlein, L., Knill, C. & Steinebach, Y. (2020)

Public Policy – A new Introduction. Book by Christoph Knill & Jale Tosun
Public Policy: A new Introduction

Knill, C. & Tosun, J. (2020)

Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap
Policy Accumulation and the Democratic Responsiveness Trap

Adam, C., Hurka, S., Knill, C. & Steinebach, Y. (2019)

Morality politics in a secular age: Strategic parties and divided governments.
Morality politics in a secular age: Strategic parties and divided governments.

Euchner, E. (2019)

International Bureaucracy
International Bureaucracy

Bauer, M.W., Knill, C. & Eckhard, S. (2017)

On the Road to Permissiveness?
On the Road to Permissiveness?

Knill, C., Adam, C. & Hurka, S. (2015)

Public Policy: A new Introduction

Knill, C. & Tosun, J. (2012)

Higher Education Governance and Policy Change in Western Europe
Higher Education Governance and Policy Change in Western Europe

Dobbins, M. & Knill, C. (2014)

Moral Policy in Germany: national regulation of societal value conflicts in historical and international comparison
Moral Policy in Germany

Knill, C., Heichel, S., Preidel, C. & Nebel, K. (2014)

Reforms of higher education policy in the wake of the Bologna Process
Reforms of higher education policy in the wake of the Bologna Process

Knill, C., Vögtle, E. M. & Dobbins, M. (2012)

Aktuelles

Tuesday, 15. October 2024 New publication: A review of national climate policies via existing databases

Prof. Dr. Yves Steinebach, Markus Hinterleitner, Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill and Dr. Xavier Fernández-i-Marín have recently published their latest research:

A review of national climate policies via existing databases

Various databases have been developed to track national climate policy efforts. These datasets facilitate comparisons across countries regarding policy activity, instrument choice, and policy effectiveness. This article evaluates these datasets to see whether they converge in their observations about climate policy development. Our findings reveal that all datasets agree at the aggregate level in that they show that ever-more climate policies are being adopted. However, they diverge significantly when scrutinizing more nuanced elements like policy instrument types and their stringency. The main contributions of our review are to highlight what research endeavors are already possible with existing datasets and to identify the gaps that still remain. We also provide concrete suggestions on how to enhance the existing datasets, making them more useful for social science research on climate policy. The article provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date source for scholars and practitioners interested in the comparative analysis of governmental climate policy efforts.

Find the full article here.

Aktuelles

Thursday, 12. September 2024 New publication: Tackling blind spots in Europeanisation research: the impact of EU legislation on national policy portfolios

Dr. Xavier Fernández-i-Marín, Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill, Christina Steinbacher and Dionys Zink have recently published their latest research:

Tackling blind spots in Europeanisation research: the impact of EU legislation on national policy portfolios

Research on the European Union over the years has significantly advanced our understanding of the domestic impact of EU policies. However, notable blind spots persist regarding the broader impact of EU legislation on national policy portfolios and its interaction with domestic policy-making. To address this gap, we introduce a novel analytical concept that adopts a macro-perspective to scrutinise the impact of EU policy-making on national policy portfolios and their trajectories over time. We analyse EU-induced change dynamics through three dimensions of national policy portfolios: policy efforts, policy innovation, and policy design quality. Applying our framework to clean air policy across 13 EU countries over 38 years, we find ambiguous effects on national policy-making. Our findings reveal that while the EU’s role in clean air policy has expanded, it simultaneously has constrained innovative potentials within national portfolios and challenged design quality, substituting rather than complementing national policy efforts. We contribute to the state of the art by providing a novel conceptual framework on the macro dynamics of multi-level policy-making, offering theoretical arguments on the expected effects of EU influence, and presenting empirical evidence of these dynamics.

Find the full article here.

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Friday, 05. July 2024 New publication: The voice of implementation: Exploring the link between street‐level integration and sectoral policy outcomes

Christina Steinbacher has recently published her latest research:

The voice of implementation: Exploring the link between street‐level integration and sectoral policy outcomes

Ineffective policies plague democratic systems and challenge their legitimacy. While existing research highlights the impor- tance of street-level bureaucrats (SLBs) as de facto “policymakers,” our understanding of SLBs’ aggregate effects on policy out- comes remains limited. Therefore, this paper proposes a shift in perspective, redirecting attention from the micro level toward institutional structures. It introduces the concept of street-level integration, which captures institutional structures enabling SLBs to form a strong voice of implementation and contribute to policy design through three integrative pathways. Analyzing the effects of street-level integration on environmental outcomes in 21 OECD countries over time, the findings reveal that street-level integration not only directly enhances outcomes through increased implementation performance but also acts as a vital factor for policy formulation increasing the effectiveness of existing and newly adopted policies. While highlighting the importance of institutional structures and SLBs for successful policymaking, the paper also offers practical recommendations for institutional reforms.

Find the full article here.

Aktuelles

Friday, 05. July 2024 New publication: The pursuit of welfare efficiency: when institutional structures turn ‘less’ into ‘more’

Christina Steinbacher has recently published her latest research:

The pursuit of welfare efficiency: when institutional structures turn ‘less’ into ‘more’

Addressing current socio-economic crises strains public budgets and may threaten fiscal sustainability. Particularly in the welfare sector, where high expenditures meet poor con- trollability, efficient resource usage is essential to ensure future governments’ capability to act while alleviating current problems. Consequently, this paper asks: why are some coun- tries more efficient in translating social expenditure into welfare outcomes? To answer this question, it is argued that efficiency is a matter of institutional structures and their vertical policy-process integration (VPI): efficiency depends on institutional structures’ capability to (1) ensure policymakers’ responsibility and to (2) provide coordinated feedback, thus pushing for considerate and informed resource use. Analysing the effect of VPI on the rela- tionship between welfare efforts and social outcomes in 21 OECD countries over three dec- ades, the results show that VPI can not only turn ‘less’ into ‘more’, but it also compensates for performance losses in the face of spending cuts.

Find the full article here.

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Friday, 05. July 2024 New job offer: PhD Researcher (M/F/D) for the ERC Project “Systemic Effects of Crises on Policy-Making in Modern Democracies” (CRISPOL)

About the position

The Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich (LMU) is one of Germany’s largest and most prestigious universities. The Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Political Science (GSI), invites applications for a PhD Researcher position starting on November 1st, 2024, or shortly thereafter. This position is initially limited to three years with the possibility of extension based on performance. Compensation is based on the E13 TV-L pay scale (65%), with potential increases for additional responsibilities such as teaching.

About the project

The position will be part of the research project “Systemic Effects of Crises on Policy- Making in Modern Democracies” (CRISPOL), which is funded by the European Research Council. The primary aim of CRISPOL is to investigate how crises create systemic trade- offs that affect policy adaptation across various sectors. CRISPOL seeks to understand the complex dynamics of policy-making in times of crisis.

The main questions to answer in the project will be:

  • How do crisis events affect the government’s policy-making activities in different policy areas? Are there shifts in policy-making activities from one policy area to the other?
  • Which political systems exhibit stronger capabilities to manage crises without neglecting policy issues in other areas, and what factors contribute to this resilience?

The project is co-organized between the LMU and the University of Oslo (UiO). The LMU Munich team is led by Christoph Knill, who is also the Principal Investigator of the overall project. The University of Oslo team will be headed by Yves Steinebach and will form part of the department’s research group on Policy, Bureaucracy, and Organisation (PBO).

Your Task

  • Collaborate in developing a novel measuring approach to map crisis events across time and regions.
  • Collaborate with other team members on research outputs with the potential for publication in leading international journals.
  • Opportunity to complete a PhD aligned with the project goals.

Your Profile

  • A Master’s degree (completed or near completion) in Political Science or a related field with excellent grades.
  • Strong interest in quantitative methods, preferably in computational social science (e.g., text-as-data approaches).
  • Experience in coding with Python and/or R.

We offer

  • Salary according to TV-L pay grade E13
  • A vibrant research environment.
  • Opportunities for international cooperation.
  • Support for publishing in leading international journals.
  • Support for participation in international conferences.
  • Opportunities to further develop your research skills (e.g., participation insummer schools).

Necessary documents

  • A cover letter (max. 2 pages) including a statement of motivation.
  • A writing sample (e.g., term paper or master’s thesis).
  • A CV detailing your prior experiences.
  • Relevant degrees and — if not yet completed — current transcript of records.

Application Process

The application deadline is September 10th, 2024. Screening and evaluation of candidates will begin immediately. We expect the evaluation process, from application deadline to offer, to take 4 weeks, depending on the number of applications. The expected start date is November 1st, 2024, or shortly thereafter. We are committed to increasing diversity in our staff and especially encourage women to apply. To apply, please provide all necessary documents via email to sekretariat.knill@gsi.uni- muenchen.de.

 

Aktuelles

Sunday, 21. April 2024 ERC Advanced Grant for professor Christoph Knill

Professor Christoph Knill has been awarded an Advanced Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) for his project CRISPOL (Systemic Effects of Crises on Policy-Making in Modern Democracies). Knill holds the Chair of Empirical Theories of Politics at LMU’s Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science. In his research, he studies shifts of policy, changes in government activity, changes in national administrative systems, and the relationship between administration and policymaking. CRISPOL investigates the systemic effects of crises on democratic policymaking.

With Advanced Grants, the ERC supports established scientists from all disciplines whose highly innovative research goes well beyond the current state of research and forges ahead into new research territories. The award comes with maximum funding of 2.5 million euros over a period of five years. For Knill, this is the third Advanced Grant in his career.

Find out more about the Advanced Grant here. 

Aktuelles

Sunday, 03. March 2024 New publication: Testing theories of policy growth: public demands, interest group politics, electoral competition, and institutional fragmentation

Dr. Xavier Fernández-i-Marín, Dr. Markus Hinterleitner, Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill and Dr. Yves Steinebach have recently published their latest research:

Testing theories of policy growth: public demands, interest group politics, electoral competition, and institutional fragmentation

Policy growth is a ubiquitous feature of modern democracies that has attracted increased attention in political science and beyond. However, the literature is characterised by considerable disagreement on why policy growth occurs. Existing explanations centre on the influence of (1) public demands, (2) interest group politics, (3) electoral competition, and (4) institutional fragmentation. While all four explanations are plausible, there are no studies that assess their relative explanatory power within a single empirical analysis. This article provides such an analysis by examining the drivers of policy growth in 21 OECD countries from 1976 to 2020 in the area of environmental policy. We identify strong ties between organised interests and the government as the primary driver of policy growth. Public demands and institutional fragmentation are relevant but comparatively less important factors, while the intensity of electoral competition has no influence on policy growth. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the functioning of democracy in the long run.

Find the full article here.

Aktuelles

Sunday, 11. February 2024 New publication: Bureaucratic overload and organizational policy triage: A comparative study of implementation agencies in five European countries

Dionys Zink, Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill and Dr. Yves Steinebach have recently published their latest research:

Bureaucratic overload and organizational policy triage: A comparative study of implementation agencies in five European countries

Research on policy implementation traditionally has focused on understanding the success or failure of individual policies within specific contexts. Little attention has been given to the challenges that emerge from the cumulative growth of policy portfolios over time. This paper is addressing this research gap by examining the phenomenon of organizational policy triage, which occurs when implementation organizations face overload and are forced to make trade-off decisions between the implementation of the different policies in their portfolios. We investigate empirical patterns of policy triage across 16 social and environmental implementation agencies in five European countries (Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and UK). We show that variation in policy triage can be explained by the combination of three central factors: blame-shifting opportunities, the mobilization of external resources, and the commitment to compensate for overload by implementation authorities.

Find the full article here.

Aktuelles

Sunday, 11. February 2024 New publication: How policy growth affects policy implementation: bureaucratic overload and policy triage

Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill, Dr. Yves Steinebach and Dionys Zink have recently published their latest research:

How policy growth affects policy implementation: bureaucratic overload and policy triage

While policies pile up in modern democracies, the effect of policy growth on policy implementation has not been addressed so far. Implementation research has focused on individual policies instead of studying the challenges implementation organizations face in dealing with growing policy stocks. In this paper, we address this research gap in three ways. First, we introduce the novel concept of organizational ‘policy triage’ which captures implementation effectiveness from an organizational rather than a policy-based perspective. Second, we develop a theoretical framework to account for variations in the prevalence of policy triage across organizations. We argue that policy triage is affected by the interplay of several factors related to (1) organizational overload vulnerability and (2) organizational overload compensation. Third, we provide an initial empirical test of our conceptual and theoretical considerations through four comparative case studies on environmental policy implementation in Ireland and England.

Aktuelles

Tuesday, 14. November 2023 New publication: Bureaucratic Quality and the Gap between Implementation Burden and Administrative Capacities

Xavier Fernández-i-Marín, Christina Steinbacher, Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill and Dr. Yves Steinebach have recently published their latest research:

Bureaucratic Quality and the Gap between Implementation Burden and Administrative Capacities

Democratic governments produce more policies than they can effectively implement. Yet, this gap between the number of policies requiring implementation and the administrative capacities available to do so is not the same in all democracies but varies across countries and sectors. We argue that this variation depends on the coupling of the sectoral bureaucracies in charge of policy formulation and those in charge of policy implementation. We consider these patterns of vertical policy- process integration an important feature of bureaucratic quality. The more the policymaking level is involved in policy implementation (top-down integration) and the easier the policy-implementing level finds it to feed its concerns into policymaking (bottom-up integration), the smaller the so-called “burden- capacity gap.” We demonstrate this effect through an empirical analysis in 21 OECD countries over a period of more than 40 years in the areas of social and environmental policies.

Find the full PDF here.

Aktuelles

Monday, 11. September 2023 New publication: Bureaucratic Overburdening in Advanced Democracies

Xavier Fernández-i-Marín, Dr. Markus Hinterleitner, Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill and Dr. Yves Steinebach have recently published their latest research:

Bureaucratic Overburdening in Advanced Democracies

Constant policy growth can overburden bureaucracies if implementation capacities are not expanded in lockstep with policy production. This development may undermine policy effectiveness and hence the long-term legitimacy of democracies. This article provides a systematic analysis of this phenomenon. We demonstrate that (i) overburdening is a general trend in advanced democracies; (ii) the extent of overburdening varies by the institutional context in which policy-makers operate; and that, in consequence, (iii) countries’ bureaucracies differ in their distance (or closeness) to the “tipping point” after which additional policies do more harm than good. We provide information on the ratio between the policies up for implementation and the bureaucratic capacities available for 21 OECD countries over a period of 45 years (1976-2020), focusing on the areas of environmental and social policy as two major areas of governmental intervention. Bayesian analyses and background interviews serve to illuminate the reasons for and consequences of overburdened bureaucracies.

Download the full document as PDF.

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Wednesday, 16. August 2023 New publication: Religiosity and attitudes toward muslim immigrants in the context of a terrorist attack

recently published her latest research:

Religiosity and attitudes toward muslim immigrants in the context of a terrorist attack

Abstract: Research on religiosity and attitudes toward immigrants is inconclusive, while it has repeatedly been reported that Islamist terrorist attacks lead to anti-immigrant attitudes. In this context, it remains unclear how these aspects interact, especially, since we can assume that religion plays an important role in light of an attack by an extremist religious group like ISIS: How does an Islamist terrorist attack moderate the relationship between religiosity and attitudes toward immigrants? The present study, therefore, analyses the relationship between religiosity and attitudes toward Muslim immigrants before and after the ‘Charlie Hebdo Attack’. It builds on the Uncertainty-Identity-Theory and the Religious Coping Literature. Analyses of European Social Survey (ESS) data reveal that the relationship varies over time: Religiosity does not predict the attitudes before the attack. Immediately after the attack, more religious individuals are less accepting. Lastly, with temporal distance, greater religiosity makes liberal attitudes more likely.

Download the full document as PDF.

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Wednesday, 16. August 2023 New publication: Contested social care – is there a ‘right’ way? How public investments diminish attitudinal differences towards social care in 34 European countries

Eva-Maria Euchner have recently published their latest research:

Contested social care – is there a ‘right’ way? How public investments diminish attitudinal differences towards social care in 34 European countries

Abstract: Research on religiosity and attitudes toward immigrants is inconclusive, while it has repeatedly been reported that Islamist terrorist attacks lead to anti-immigrant attitudes. In this context, it remains unclear how these aspects interact, especially, since we can assume that religion plays an important role in light of an attack by an extremist religious group like ISIS: How does an Islamist terrorist attack moderate the relationship between religiosity and attitudes toward immigrants? The present study, therefore, analyses the relationship between religiosity and attitudes toward Muslim immigrants before and after the ‘Charlie Hebdo Attack’. It builds on the Uncertainty-Identity-Theory and the Religious Coping Literature. Analyses of European Social Survey (ESS) data reveal that the relationship varies over time: Religiosity does not predict the attitudes before the attack. Immediately after the attack, more religious individuals are less accepting. Lastly, with temporal distance, greater religiosity makes liberal attitudes more likely.

Download the full document as PDF.

Aktuelles

Wednesday, 16. August 2023 New publication: Policy growth, implementation capacities, and the effect on policy performance

Xavier Fernández-i-Marín, Markus Hinterleitner, Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill and Dr. Yves Steinebach have recently published their latest research:

Policy growth, implementation capacities, and the effect on policy performance

Abstract: Democratic governments have constantly added new policies to existing policy stocks to confront societal, economic, and environmental challenges. This development has the potential to overburden public administrations in charge of policy implementation. To address this issue, we theorize and analyze how the relationship between the size of sectoral policy portfolios and implementation capacities affects sectoral policy performance. Our Bayesian analysis of the environmental policies of 21 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries from 1976 to 2020 reveals a widening “gap” between the policies up for implementation and the implementation capacities available and shows that this gap negatively affects environmental policy performance. Qualitative insights from 47 in-depth interviews with implementers validate these findings and shed light on the underlying causal processes. Our findings suggest that in advanced democracies transforming additional policies into effective problem-solving crucially hinges on the deliberate expansion of implementation capacities.

Download the full document as PDF.

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Saturday, 15. July 2023 New book: Routledge Handbook of Environmental Policy

Helge Jörgens, Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill and Dr. Yves Steinebach have published their new book:

This Handbook provides a state-of-the-art review of research on environmental policy and governance.

The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Policy has a strong focus on new problem structures – a perspective that emphasizes the preconditions and processes of environmental policymaking – and a comparative approach that covers all levels of local, national, and global policymaking. The volume examines the different conditions under which environmental policymaking takes place in different regions of the world and tracks the theoretical, conceptual, and empirical developments that have been made in recent years. It also highlights emerging areas where new and/or additional research and reflection are warranted. Divided into four key parts, the accessible structure and the nature of the contributions allow the reader to quickly find a concise expert review on topics that are most likely to arise in the course of conducting research or developing policy, and to obtain a broad, reliable survey of what is presently known about the subject.

The resulting compendium is an essential resource for students, scholars, and policymakers working in this vital field.

Find the book here.

Aktuelles

Thursday, 06. July 2023 New publication: Autocracies and policy accumulation: the case of Singapore

Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill, Dr. Yves Steinebach and Christian Aschenbrenner have recently published their latest research:

Autocracies and policy accumulation: the case of Singapore

Abstract: The tendency of vote-seeking politicians to produce ever-more policies in response to the citizens’ demands has been identified as a central driver of the process of “policy accumulation.” If we accept this premise, policy accumulation should be a central feature of modern democracies but overall be less pronounced in autocracies. Due to its highly ambivalent nature, policy accumulation and its implications may thus constitute an important but so far neglected facets of the new system competition between democracies and autocracies. In this article, we test this argument in the context of the authoritarian regime of Singapore. Singapore is one of the very few autocracies that display elements of political competition and has a level of socio-economic development that is comparable to advanced democracies. Singapore thus constitutes a least-likely case for low levels of policy accumulation. By studying changes in Singapore’s environmental policy over a period of more than four decades (1976 to 2020) and by contrasting the patterns observed with the policy developments in 21 OECD democracies, we find that autocratic regimes do indeed tend to accumulate less than democratic regimes. More precisely, we find that Singapore (1) has only produced about one-fourth of the environmental policy measures of an “average” democracy and (2) is constantly the country with the lowest level of policy accumulation in our sample. These findings hold even when controlling for alternative explanations, such as the effectiveness of the administration and the government’s ability to opt for stricter and more hierarchical forms of intervention.

Download the full document as PDF.

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Wednesday, 17. May 2023 New publication: Rules as policy data? Measuring and linking policy substance and legislative context

Dr. Steffen Hurka, Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill and Dr. Yves Steinebach have recently published their latest research:

Rules as policy data? Measuring and linking policy substance and legislative context

Abstract: There is growing scholarly interest in analyzing changes in policies, laws, and regulations. Some concepts depart from the goal of identifying changes in policy substance. Other contributions have concentrated on the structural characteristics of laws and regulations containing these substantive changes. Extracting measures of policy substance from legislative texts is a challenging and time-consuming endeavor as it requires the manual assessment and coding of legal acts. The assessment of the structural characteristics of laws and regulations, by contrast, can be done applying automated natural language processing. An important critical question is, thus, whether we can combine these approaches and simplify the information extraction by inferring changes in the policy substance from the legislative context in which these changes are embedded. Examining more than 100 legal acts in the area of EU environmental and climate policy, we find that the measures capturing policy substance and the structural characteristics of legal acts context are not systematically linked. In other words: changes in the structural features of legal acts cannot be used as an approximation for changes in policy substance. We conclude by sketching out a research agenda when (and when not) to use the different concepts and related measurements.

Download the full document as PDF.

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Monday, 24. April 2023 New publication: More control–less agency slack? Principal control and the risk of agency slack in international organizations

Dr. Vytautas Jankauskas, Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill and Louisa Bayerlein have published a news research paper:

“More control–less agency slack? Principal control and the risk of agency slack in international organizations”

Abstract:

Principal-agent theorizing is based on the idea of a linear inverse relationship between principal control and agency slack: the higher the control over the agent, the less likely is the agent to slack. In this paper, we challenge this assumption by explicitly taking the varying nature of agents into account. While control may reduce the agent’s room for maneuver, it does not explain the extent to which different agents are inclined to put efforts in circumventing these obstacles. Focusing on international organizations (IOs), we measure member states’ as principals’ control over IO administrations as their agents as well as the latter’s intrinsic propensity to slack across eight major IOs. The analysis shows that low control by the principal is not necessarily associated with run-away agents, whereas high control is not necessarily associated with servant-like agents. The assumed control–slack relationship can thus be distorted and determining an ideal level of control is not possible without considering the agent’s entrepreneurialism.

Download the full PDF.

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Friday, 20. January 2023 New publication: Political challengers and norm erosion in advanced democracies

Dr. Markus Hinterleitner and Dr. Fritz Sager have published their most recent research:

“Political challengers and norm erosion in advanced democracies”

Abstract: How do politicians in advanced democracies get away with violating political norms? Although norm violators confront a powerful establishment that can penalize them, norm violations currently occur in many advanced democracies. This article analyzes the conflicts between norm-violating challengers and established politicians and parties as norm defenders in multiparty systems to contribute to the discipline’s understanding of norm erosion processes. Based on diachronic and synchronic comparisons of conflicts over norm violations in Austria and Germany, the article reveals how political challengers can already damage democratic norms from a position of institutional weakness. Norm violators that make ambiguous provocations and can leverage their previously acquired democratic credentials, can more credibly dispel attempts to stigmatize them as undemocratic. In doing so, they turn the tables on the political establishment and portray its sanctions as a form of ‘excessive retaliation’ that constitutes a norm violation in itself. The article concludes with the unsettling finding that (verbal) norm protection can facilitate norm erosion.

Find the full PDF here.

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Monday, 16. January 2023 New publication: Blame games and democratic responsiveness

Dr. Markus Hinterleitner has recently published his newest research:

“Blame games and democratic responsiveness”

Abstract: The link between opinion and policy is central to the functioning of representative democracy. Democracies are responsive to their citizens’ preferences if citizens can influence governments’ policy output. This article conceptualizes political blame games about policy controversies as venues of democratic responsiveness to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the opinion-policy link in policy-heavy, conflictual democracies. The article shows how political actors convert public feedback to a policy controversy into blame game interactions, which in turn lead to political and policy responses by the government. A comparative-historical analysis of nine blame games in the United Kingdom, Germany and Switzerland reveals how institutions structure blame game interactions, and thus influence a political system’s responsiveness during blame games. The analysis suggests that an important, yet neglected, expression of democratic quality of political systems is their ability to translate blame game interactions into policy responses. The study of blame games as venues of democratic responsiveness thus provides a new conceptual tool for assessing the health of representative democracies in more conflictual times.

Download the full PDF here.

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Saturday, 14. January 2023 New book: International Public Administrations in Global Public Policy

Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill and Dr. Yves Steinebach have published their newest book

“International Public Administrations in Global Public Policy – Sources and Effects of Bureaucratic Influence”

About the book: This book examines the rise and agency of International Organizations (IOs) and their bureaucratic bodies— the International Public Administrations (IPAs)— as a reflection of an ongoing transfer of political authority and power from the domestic to the international level.

It shows that IPAs represent actors per se, with autonomy and resources that allow them to exert an independent influence on global policy-making processes and outputs. Providing a combination of novel conceptual lenses and research design to capture IPAs as an empirical phenomenon, the book takes an open, theoretically and methodologically diverse approach to show that IPAs are far from being negligible actors in global public policy and must be taken seriously as actors in policy-making beyond the nation-state.

This book will be of key interest to students, scholars, and practitioners in Public Policy and Public Administration, International Relations, International Political Economy, as well as Organizational Studies.

To the full book.

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Thursday, 12. January 2023 New Book released: Street-Level Workers as Institutional Entrepreneurs

Olivia Mettang has recently published her research concerning street-level analysis:

“Street-Level Workers as Institutional Entrepreneurs”

About the book: Introducing the institutional logics perspective to street-level analysis, this book examines how street-level workers deal with the institutional logics that guide their organization – whether they follow or challenge them. While doing so, the book develops a theoretical framework to study street-level workers’ institutional agency within organizations from different institutional backgrounds.

The book conceptualizes street-level workers as institutional entrepreneurs and presents an original process model to capture deinstitutionalization efforts in street-level discourse. This ordinal model accounts for embedded agency and institutional entrepreneurship as well as for more gradual moves towards deinstitutionalization through the hybridization of institutional logics. The author tests the model empirically using interview data and discusses how street-level workers diverge from the institutional logic of their organization in almost two thirds of their statements, indicating a tendency towards institutional entrepreneurship. The book finally combines two literature strands: institutionalism and implementation research, showing how street-level workers may be perceived as institutional entrepreneurs.

This book will appeal to students, scholars, and researchers of political science, public policy, public administration, and organizational studies, as well as to practitioners and policy-makers interested in a better understanding of institutional entrepreneurs, street work, and the institutional logics perspective.
Find the full book.

Aktuelles

Wednesday, 11. January 2023 New Publication: Christian churches and social welfare in secular times: How goal congruence shapes religious involvement in morality-based social services

Olivia Mettang and Dr. Eva-Maria Euchner recently published a new research paper in Politics and Religion:

“Christian churches and social welfare in secular times: How goal congruence shapes religious involvement in morality-based social services”

Abstract: We study the extent and nature of Christian engagement in morality policy implementation by means of a comparative case study in Germany. In particular, we observe that the nature of engagement varies between unconnected and corresponding types of activities, and we explain this variation with the policy-specific goal congruence between religious organizations (ROs) and the state. Goal congruence, in turn, can be linked to Catholic and Protestant moral doctrines that tell us about ROs’ position on morality issues. The study contributes to the literature on faith-based welfare by highlighting the role of moral doctrines as drivers of ROs’ social engagement.

Find the full paper as a PDF.

Aktuelles

Tuesday, 06. December 2022 Award-winning publication: Gordon Smith and Vincent Wright Memorial Prizes – WEP prizes 2022

Dr. Eva-Maria Euchner, together with Irina Ciornei and Ilay Yesil, was awarded for her research. The publication “Political parties and Muslims in Europe: the regulation of Islam in public education“, which appeared in West European Politics, Volume: 45, Number: 5 in 2022 , has now been awarded the Gordon Smith and Vincent Wright Memorial Prize.

The research was conducted as part of the DFG/SNF-funded project “Religion and Morality Policies.”

The article outlines and explains the differential integration of Islamic religious education in state schools in 13 European countries and for a period of 40 years (1970-2010). Based on a new dataset, the paper illustrates that left-leaning governments tend to accelerate the integration process, while Christian Democrat-dominated governments are conducive to equal integration of Islam in state curricula.  The study thus enriches our understanding of party political action in times of secularization, and illustrates that Christian Democratic parties promote the integration of Muslims in order to preserve religious elements in the school system.

We congratulate Dr. Euchner on this award.

Aktuelles

Sunday, 11. September 2022 New Publication: Analyzing Policy Proximity Through Media Reporting

Christoph Knill, Yves Steinebach and Bastian Buitkamp have published their newest research paper

“Analyzing Policy Proximity Through Media Reporting”

in “der moderne Staat”.

Abstract: Policy changes in one subsystem can easily spill over to other subsystems. An approach that addresses these interconnections is the concept of ‘policy proximity’. This concept posits that different policy issues share common features that make them more or less likely to change together. Unfortunately, however, we have no systematic knowledge of the proximity between policy areas. In this article, we address this shortcoming by proposing a novel measurement concept of policy proximity that captures the proximity between different policy issues based on their joint appearance in media reporting. To do so, we conduct a relational content analysis of all media reports aired by the German news broadcast ‘Tagesschau’ between the years 2013 to 2021. We show that policy issues substantially differ in their connectivity with other subjects and identify for each subsystem the closest ‘neighbors’. We conclude by discussing our results in light of existing policy change theories.

Full Text as PDF.

Aktuelles

Sunday, 11. September 2022 New Publication – Systemic Dynamics of Policy Change: Overcoming Some Blind Spots of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory

Xavier Fernandez-i-Marín, Steffen Hurka, Christoph Knill and Yves Steinebach have published their new paper

“Systemic Dynamics of Policy Change: Overcoming Some Blind Spots of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory”

in the Policy Studies Journal 50 (3), 527-552.

Abstract: In this article, we analyze dynamics of policy change from the perspective of Punctuated Equilibrium Theory (PET). In particular, we investigate how economic crises impact on patterns of policy change in policy areas that vary in terms of their proximity to economic matters: social, environmental, and morality policy. We make two contributions. First, we show that economic crises lead to more incrementalist patterns of policy change in crisis-remote policy subsystems and make policy punctuations in these areas less likely. However, if such punctuations do occur, they tend to be particularly extreme. Second, we argue that the empirical implications of PET are best tested by separately analyzing variance as an indicator for incrementalism and degrees of freedom as an indicator for punctuations. The empirical analysis builds on two data sets capturing policy output changes in 13 European countries over a period of 34 years (1980–2013).

Aktuelles

Tuesday, 26. July 2022 New publication: Religious identification and Muslim immigrants’ acculturation preferences for newly arriving immigrants in Germany

Verena Benoit has recently published her new research paper in the journal “Ethnic and Racial Studies”.

Religious identification and Muslim immigrants’ acculturation preferences for newly arriving immigrants in Germany

Abstract: 

Acculturation preferences of immigrants and the host population differ substantially. Research on the former predominantly focused on immigrants’ preferences for their acculturation process. It remains unclear what they prefer for other immigrants. Therefore, the present study analyses how Muslim immigrants’ religious identification shapes their preferences for the acculturation of other immigrants. It focuses on religious identification as the central determinant because Muslim immigrants’ faith differentiates them from a Christian or secular host population. Furthermore, it is a source of self-identification that affects attitudes and preferences. The study relies on the Social Identity Theory and utilizes a sample of Muslim immigrants in Germany. The analyses reveal that stronger identification makes it more likely to prefer combined culture and (to a lesser extent) separation, while it makes it less likely to prefer assimilation. Additionally, members of the minority within Islam in Germany are more likely to prefer separation than the majority.

You can now download the article.

Aktuelles

Tuesday, 19. July 2022 New Publication: Policy’s role in democratic conflict management

Markus Hinterleitner and Fritz Sager have published their newest research:

Policy’s role in democratic conflict management

 

Abstract:

This article proposes rethinking democratic conflict management by acknowledging the increasingly important role policy plays in it. As the debate on the health of democracy intensifies, research on how democracies manage and absorb political and societal conflicts becomes broadly relevant. Existing theories and perspectives view conflict management through the lens of elections and other institutional mechanisms, or they examine the social and economic preconditions for successful conflict management while inadequately understanding how policies contribute to conflict management. The article develops a theoretical framework that allows for the analysis of how policies’ material and interpretive effects influence societal conflicts and thereby strengthen (or weaken) democracy. While the article focuses on hypothesis-generation rather than hypothesis-testing, it draws on a large variety of policy and case examples to corroborate and illustrate the theoretical expectations embodied in the framework. Insights into policy’s role in democratic conflict management expand our understanding of the challenges to democracy in the twenty-first century and create new possibilities for comparative, policy-focused research into what makes democracy work.

Here you can Download the full PDF.

Please cite as: Hinterleitner, M., Sager, F. Policy’s role in democratic conflict management. Policy Sci 55, 239–254 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11077-022-09461-7

Aktuelles

Tuesday, 31. May 2022 Talk by Prof. Dr. Achim Goerres

The Chair for Empirical Theories of Politics invites to the talk of

Prof. Dr. Achim Goerres,

Professor of Empirical Political Science  | University of Duisburg-Essen

Living in Novaland: Can we Simulate the Experience of

States and Public Policies in an Artificial Online State?

 31. Mai 2022, 18 Uhr s.t.

Geschwister-Scholl-Institut, Room 169

What if we could experimentally manipulate all characteristics of states and public policies and estimate their effects on citizens? This presentation puts forward the first evidence from a pilot of Novaland.

Novaland is an artificial liberal democracy that only exists online and that has characteristics realistically drawn from German, Romanian and US contexts.

The pilot consists of an experimental online platform based on text, images and audio in which volunteers (a) are surveyed before they go into the experience, (b) are randomly assigned to different experiences, such as defined by income, quality of government or state corruption, (c) interact with each other simultaneously and (d) thereby co-create collective decisions, such as elections or donation pools, that then determine the course of Novaland and thereby the subsequent experiences of the participants.

The pilot gives us many insights into the usefulness of such full experiential simulations in the social sciences.

Can this technically and organizationally be done?  Do participants behave in an externally valid manner?

Do they behave sincerely? What is the potential of such an approach for finding causal effects?

The project is financed by a Consolidator Grant of the European Research Council.

More details about the project at https://bit.ly/politsolid

And about the presenter at www.achimgoerres.de

Aktuelles

Monday, 21. October 2019 ERC Advanced Grant for Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill

The responsiveness to societal demands is both the key virtue and the key problem of modern democracies. On the one hand, responsiveness is a central cornerstone of democratic legitimacy. On the other hand, responsiveness inevitably entails policy accumulation. While policy accumulation often positively reflects modernisation and human progress, it also undermines democratic government in three main ways. First, policy accumulation renders policy content increasingly complex, which crowds out policy substance from public debates and leads to an increasingly unhealthy discursive prioritisation of politics over policy. Secondly, policy accumulation comes with aggravating implementation deficits, as it produces administrative backlogs and incentivises selective implementation. Finally, policy accumulation undermines the pursuit of evidence-based public policy, because it threatens our ability to evaluate the increasingly complex interactions within growing policy mixes. The authors argue that the stability of democratic systems will crucially depend on their ability to make policy accumulation more sustainable.

Aktuelles

Monday, 20. May 2019 Gastbeitrag in der NZZ von Christoph Knill, Christian Adam, Steffen Hurka und Yves Steinebach

Die Politik wird in ihrer wachsenden Regulierungsdichte auch immer komplexer. Um die Akzeptanz gegenüber dem demokratischen Prozess zu erhalten, müssen Bürger wissen, wie Gesetze erlassen werden und wie sie selber von diesen betroffen sind.

Vollständiger Artikel [https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/die-moderne-demokratie-droht-sich-selber-zu-ueberfordern-ld.1464383]

Aktuelles

Wednesday, 31. May 2017 Christian Adam, Christoph Knill and Xavier Fernandez-i-Marín are awarded the Science Prize Bureaucracy

The joint work of Christian Adam, Christoph Knill and Xavier Fernandez-i-Marín examines the relationship between the growth of rules and the effectiveness of governments. With their study, they contribute to a better understanding of the importance of bureaucracy for the development of state regulatory systems, the jury explains.

The 5,000 Euro price was donated by Fritz Hellwig, founding director of the Institute of the German Econonmy (IW), and awarded for the first time in 2015. It is intended to encourage science to deal with the working methods and development dynamics of bureaucracies and to get to the bottom of their impact on those affected and society in general. The reason for the creation of the price was the concern that “regulatory and administrative provisions are overgrowing the market,” says Hellwig.

This year’s jury for the Bureaucracy Science Prize consisted of Martin Hellwig, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods in Bonn, Johannes Ludewig, Chairman of the National Standards Control Council, Renate Mayntz, Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, Daniel Zimmer, Director of the Institute for Commercial and Economic Law at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn, and Michael Hüther, Director of the IW. The IW is responsible for the management of the science prize.

Aktuelles

Wednesday, 27. May 2015 Prof. Knill appointed as Full Member of the Center for Advanced Studies (CAS)

Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill has been appointed as a full member of the Center for Advanced Studies by the President of the LMU on 1.10.2014. The “Center for Advanced Studies” of the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München sees itself as a forum for intensive scientific exchange across established subject boundaries. With its activities, it promotes various forms of cooperative research and interdisciplinary communication within the university; in addition, it supports the integration of guest researchers into the academic life of the LMU. Unlike the traditional “Institutes for Advanced Study”, the CAS is not a separate academic institution from the everyday life of university research. Rather, outstanding personalities who conduct research and teach at the LMU and who are appointed members are to receive further encouragement and support for the implementation of innovative cooperation projects. The members have a comprehensive range of services at their disposal for sounding out and carrying out scientific projects and collaborations.

Aktuelles

Wednesday, 27. May 2015 DFG supports research unit on the topic international public administration

The German Research Foundation (DFG) has approved the project „International Public Administration. Emergence and Development of Administrative Patterns and their Effects on International Policy-Making“ led by Professor Dr. Christoph Knill.

A nationwide research unit will be granted funds amounting to 2.8 million euros for a total of six years. Ten researchers will study various topic areas of international public administration in a total of eight projects. As from the start of the funding on 1 April 2014, different administration styles and single decision-making processes in international administration will be investigated.

With the increasing importance of global institutions, bureaucracy has become an essential characteristic of the international system. The administrative body of international organisations has never before played a more important role in national and international policy-making. Nevertheless, only little is known about the internal organisational structures and decision-making processes, administrative processes as well as about the organisation’s independence vis-à-vis political interests and its relations to other administrations and social players. The research unit led will address exactly these topics in order to analyse how administrative patterns emerge and develop.

In close dialogue with neighbouring subdisciplines, particularly in the field of international relations, the central questions will be: How autonomous is the administration vis-à-vis the member states? How is it linked to the national administration? Does the administration have its own expertise?

„The close collaboration of highly regarded researchers of that field and the systematic involvement of young researchers will contribute to consolidating the importance of public administration as a subdiscipline of political science“, emphasises Christoph Knill, who is the spokesman of the nationwide research unit.

Ø 02

Papers per
Conference

28

Bikes in
the team

168 h

Brain capacity
per day

26.500 km

Train
trumps plane

Teaching

WINTERSEMESTER 2024/2025
Veranstaltung
Dozent
Zeit
Ort
image descriptionRaum
Bachelor-, Master- und Doktoradenseminar
Tue. 16:00-18:00 Uhr s.t.
Oettingenstr. 67
165
Bachelorkolloquium
Tue. 16:00-18:00 Uhr c.t.
Oettingenstr.
165
Fundamentals of Public Administration
Mon. 16:00-17:00 Uhr s.t.
Oettingenstr. 67
U151
Fundamentals of Public Administration
Tue. 14:00-15:00 Uhr s.t.
Oettingenstr. 67
U151
Fundamentals of Public Policy
Mon. 17:00-18:00 Uhr s.t.
Oettingenstr. 67
U151
Fundamentals of Public Policy
Tue. 15:00-16:00 Uhr c.t.
Oettingenstr. 67
U 151
Governing Complex Policy Problems
Wed. 12:00-14:00 Uhr c.t.
Oettingenstr. 67
061
The European Union in Complex Policy Areas
Wed. 16:00-18:00 Uhr c.t.
Grundkurs Politische Theorie
Tue. 14:00-16:00 Uhr s.t.
Oettingenstr. 67
165
Klimapolitik in demokratischen Systemen
Wed. 12:00-14:00 Uhr s.t.
Oettingenstr. 67
033
Migrations- und Integrationspolitik in liberalen Demokratien
Wed. 14:00-16:00 Uhr c.t.
Geschw.-Scholl-Pl. 1 (E)
E 206
Introduction to Public Policy Analysis
Wed. 16:00-18:00 Uhr c.t.
Amalienstr. 17
A 107
Policy Accumulation and Rule Growth
Wed. 14:00-16:00 Uhr c.t.
Amalienstr. 73A
110
Vergangene Semester

Contact


Address

  • Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München Geschwister-Scholl-Institut für Politikwissenschaft Lehrstuhl für Empirische Theorien der Politik
  • Oettingenstrasse 67
    80538 München
  • Sekretariat
    Annette Ohlenhard
  • sekretariat.knill@gsi.uni-muenchen.de
    +49 89 2180 9060