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.

Dr. Verena Benoit has 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.

Dr. Verena Benoit and Dr. 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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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

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

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.

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]

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.

Interview vom 06.08.2015 im Deutschlandfunk: „Kunststudent verzichtet auf Konsum“ [https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/kapitalismus-kunststudent-verzichtet-auf-konsum.862.de.html?dram:article_id=327560]

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.

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.