Alexa Lenz, Christoph Knill and Yves Steinebach have recently published their latest research:

Addition preferences among policymakers as driver of policy growth

Policy growth has become a defining feature of modern governance, contributing to administrative overload and reduced policy effectiveness. While most research addresses this phenomenon from a macro-level perspective, this study examines how individual policymakers contribute to policy growth through a systematic preference for additive policy solutions. Integrating insights from social psychology, public administration, and political science, the article argues that addition preferences stem from cognitive mechanisms, such as subtraction neglect, and strategic incentives linked to policy expansion. Using a survey experiment with 1,454 elected policymakers in Norway, it tests the prevalence of addition preferences and how they are influenced by contextual conditions. The results reveal (1) a persistent addition preference among policymakers; and (2) that information about available implementation capacities can slightly reduce these tendencies. These findings advance behavioural understanding of policy development and democratic governance, emphasising the need to expose decision-makers to implementation realities.

Find the full article here.

Constantin Kaplaner, Alexa Lenz, Vanessa Millich, Christoph Knill, Yves Steinebach, Clara Fochler and Annika Kolbe have recently published their latest research:

Facets of Crises: How Problem Indicators and Public Perceptions Affect Policy Change

Crises are widely acknowledged as catalysts for policy change. Yet, our understanding of the policy effects of crises remains limited. Why do only some crises lead to major changes, while significant policy changes also occur during seemingly non‐crisis periods? This paper addresses this gap by distinguishing between two critical “components” of crises: objective problem pressures and public perceptions. We argue that these components often co‐occur but may not always align, leading to differing changes in policy outputs. Using migration policy in Switzerland as a crucial case study, we explore fluctuations in both objective metrics and public sentiment over a period of 25 years (1994 to 2019). Our analysis reveals that substantial policy changes typically occur when both components highlight crisis conditions. However, notable policy change can also be triggered by either high objective pressures or strong public perceptions of crisis. These findings highlight the significance of how scholars define and conceptualize crises, as well as the dimensions—whether objective or perceptual—that they use.

Find the full article here.

Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill, Prof. Dr. Yves Steinebach and Dr. Dionys Zink have published their new book:

Triage Bureaucracy: The Organizational Challenge of Implementing Growing Policy Stocks

In an era of constant policy growth (known as policy accumulation), effective policy implementation is a growing challenge for democratic governance across the globe. Triage Bureaucracy explores how government agencies handle expanding portfolios of rules, programs, and regulations using ‘policy triage’ – a set of strategies for balancing limited resources across increasing implementation demands. Drawing on case studies from six diverse European countries, the authors show how organizations’ vulnerability to overburdening and their ability to compensate for overload determine why policy implementation succeeds in some cases while it fails in others. Triage Bureaucracy offers a deeper understanding of the organizational dynamics behind effective governance and, by placing bureaucratic actors at the center of the policy process, shows why policy growth often outpaces our ability to implement it – shedding light on the consequences of an ever expanding policy state. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

Find the book here.

Analyzing Climate Policy Portfolios

This paper introduces the concept of policy portfolios as a new analytical tool for examining climate policies. Climate policy portfolios systematically categorize government actions along two key dimensions: (i) the target dimension, which identifies the specific goals being addressed, and (ii) the instrument dimension, which outlines the policy instruments employed to achieve these goals. The advantages of utilizing climate policy portfolios are manifold. Primarily, these portfolios provide a clear and illustrative framework for visualizing governments’ climate policy actions. Additionally, the structured categorization across these two dimensions enhances the analysis of the size, growth, diversity, and similarities within countries’ climate policy portfolios. To illustrate the effectiveness of the climate policy portfolio approach, the article leverages the OECD CAPMF dataset to map the evolution of portfolio development across 49 countries.

Find the full article here.

Constantin Kaplaner, M.A., Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill and Prof. Dr. Yves Steinebach have recently published their latest research:

The EPA’s Acid Rain Program shows how more policy can often mean less enforcement

Find the full blog post here. 

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

Towards ‘better deregulation’: from crude cost-cutting to the targeted pruning of policy activities

Deregulation is a prominent theme, but difficult to implement. Current approaches either focus only on ‘new’ rules without considering already existing policies, or fail to differentiate between effective policies and those that impose unnecessary regulatory burdens. This paper proposes a new, policy-informed approach to deregulation that addresses these issues by centering on existing policies and their interactions. The approach consists of three steps: (i) creating a systematic overview of government activities within a specific policy area, (ii) identifying stacked policies – multiple measures addressing the same issue, and (iii) pruning conflicting measures. By applying this approach to the environmental policy portfolios of 21 advanced democracies, we find an average deregulation potential of about 36 percent of existing measures per country. We additionally provide a specific list of policy measures for each country that merit scrutiny for potential deregulation and indicate whether these measures would have to be abolished at the national or at the EU level. This targeted approach seeks to enhance regulatory efficiency while preserving essential policies that support effective governance.

Find the full article here.

Constantin Kaplaner, M.A., Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill and Prof. Dr. Yves Steinebach have recently published their latest research:

Administrative overload and policy triage: causal evidence from the introduction of the Acid Rain Program in the United States

Recent research suggests that additional public policies can sometimes decrease overall policy effectiveness rather than improve the problem-solving capacity of the state. This occurs when new policies are not supported by additional administrative capacities, leading to an overburdened administration. Public authorities handle the increased workload by employing “policy triage,” which involves reallocating resources among different policies. Despite this straightforward argument, a systematic understanding of these dynamics is lacking in the existing literature. This paper addresses this by examining the US Environmental Protection Agency’s introduction of the Acid Rain Program. Utilizing a difference-in-differences analysis, it reveals a significant reduction in inspections for industrial sites not covered by the Acid Rain Program as administrators redirected enforcement efforts. These findings, robust against various alternative explanations, highlight the inherent trade-offs in the public sector when policy and administrative expansions are not considered together. To assess broader relevance, we complement our analysis with twenty-eight interviews in Germany, Italy, and Portugal, showing that policy triage is a common response to administrative overload across diverse institutional contexts.

Find the full article here.

A recent global analysis of research productivity in political science places Prof. Dr. Christoph Knill among the ten most cited political scientists in Europe. The study evaluated over 115,000 academic articles using objective metrics such as citation counts and publications in leading journals.

Find the full article here.

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

Do Governments Put Their Money Where Their Mouth Is? Policy Adoption And Administrative Resource Provision in 15 OECD Countries

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

More Liberty, More Rules? Abortion Policy and the Liberalization-Rule Nexus

While conventional wisdom often equates liberalization with deregulation, theoretical arguments from different scientific backgrounds suggest that states tend to increase their rule stock when they adopt more liberal policies. This article studies the case of abortion policy to better understand the liberalization-rule nexus. By examining data from 25 countries over 50years, we empirically assess the dynamics between liberalization events and corresponding regulatory changes. Our findings reveal that while the majority of countries does indeed introduce more rules upon liberalizing abortion, the extent of these regulatory changes varies considerably. The analysis suggests that the extent of rule growth depends on the conflicts that characterize liberalization processes in particular countries and time periods. Right-leaning governments, religious groups and institutional veto players are shown to have a positive influence on rule growth. On the contrary, higher levels of liberalization reduce the necessity for additional rules. By illuminating a contested empirical relationship, the article helps to better understand the implications of liberalization in modern democracies.

Find the full article here.

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

Analyzing industrial policy portfolios

Industrial policy has regained political attention due to the challenges associated with global market integration, technological changes, and the need for sustainable transfor–mation. However, the lack of a consistent understanding of industrial policy hampers systematic comparisons. This paper develops a novel concept of industrial policy port–folios that captures different dimensions of industrial policy outputs across countries and over time. We illustrate this approach by comparing the policy dynamics in the United States and Germany over the last four decades and show that despite similar dynamics of policy growth, the countries display pronounced variation in the areas and instruments they prioritized.

Find the full article here.

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.

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.

Christina Steinbacher has recently published her latest research:

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

Find the full article here.

Christina Steinbacher has recently published her latest research:

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.