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.