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In the latest round of ERC grants, Prof. Fleischer was successful and received an ERC Consolidator Grant for her research project "STATE-DNA".
The project "Evolutionary Government: Origins and Consequences of Structural Change in Government" (STATE-DNA) studies change in formal structures of government organizations at the level of individual units inside ministries and agencies. The causes and effects of this structural change are discussed in various debates, i.e., as the structural dimension of (administrative) state capacity, as substructures of ministerial portfolios, or as elements in the structure and organization of government and actors in executive policymaking.
STATE-DNA combines these perspectives and conceives these entities as the "building blocks" of the modern state, which can thus also be examined from an evolutionary biology perspective. Accordingly, the ERC project will use new theories and methods, including from the natural sciences, to investigate the origins and consequences of structural change in France, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, and the United Kingdom from 1815 to 2025.
The ERC Consolidator Grant comes with funding of approx. 2 million euros and the project will run for 5 years.
Julia Fleischer and other co-authors have published an article explaining government reorganization in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom from 1980 to 2013 in Governance. The aim of the article is to assess the structural choices of government reorganization with a focus on the core of the state. The results show that shifts in the ideological profile of cabinets as well as the proximity of units to political leaders have significant effects. Conservative governments are not significant for the likelihood of structural change. The article explains the effects of government reorganzitation in relation to different research debates on assessing the internal workings of governments.
The article can be found here.
Ole A. Danielsen and Julia Fleischer have published an article explaining structural changes inside Norwegian ministries from 1947 to 2019 in Governance. The article examines when and why Norwegian governments prefer to establish a new directorate or a new delegated agency. The aim is to compare coalition theory explanations with an organizational theoretical perspective that focuses more on, e.g., the range of organizational forms available in a ministry. The empirical analysis shows the significance of key partisan determinants, although sectoral patterns also emerge, which will be studied in future work.
The article can be found here.
Julia Fleischer and co-authors have published an article on formal name changes of ministerial units in all federal ministries in Germany from 1980 to 2013, together with similar units in France and the Netherlands, in Public Administration. The aim of the article is to examine the relevance of partisan dynamics as well as key features of the bureaucratic organization for such structural changes in government. The results show that ministerial units at the lower hierarchical level (in Germany: subdivisions) experience name changes more frequently than units at the higher level. Moreover, that key partisan features explain these patterns of structural changes.
The article can be found here.
Jana Paasch has published an article on policy implementation of European policy output in the German multi-level system in the Journal of Common Market Studies. In the article, she discusses the impact of party competition, the parties’ policy positions on specific policy dimensions as well as the capacities of the German Bundesländer on the effective policy implementation of EU directives.
The article can be found here.
Andree Pruin and Lukas Thiele have published a post on Open Innovation in times of crisis on the blog Innovation durch Krise (Innovation through Crisis). The blog post presents first insights into a study in progress and discusses to what extent hackathon projects can support governmental crisis management. Projects from the #WirVsVirus hackathon, which took place in March 2020 under the auspices of the German government, are being examined. The blog post demonstrates that hackathon projects can provide additional channels for identifying and resolving crisis-related issues. However, uncertainties often stand in the way of a more long-term collaboration between administration and project teams, and ambivalent effects regarding the democratic potential of hackathon projects emerge.
The work was done as part of the EU Horizon 2020 research project TROPICO (Transforming into Open, Innovative and Collaborative Governments).
The blog post can be found here.
Julia Fleischer and Nora Carstens have published an article on policy labs in Public Management Review. They discuss the relevance of policy labs for policy design in the digital transformation of the German public sector. Based on a comparative case study of two digitalization labs, the article addresses the question which factors shape boundary spanning activities in the laboratories. In particular, the authors examine the influence of the organisational field, the actors’ constellations and the capabilities of the lab members on boundary spanning and policy design in the labs.
This work is part of the EU Horizon 2020 research project TROPICO (Transforming into Open, Innovative and Collaborative Governments).
The article can be found here.
Nora Carstens has published an article on digitalisation labs in German Politics. She discusses the development of new multilevel collaboration in Germany that has been created under the Online Access Act (OZG) and investigates how institutional settings, internal dynamics and actors’ composition influence policy design processes. This work is part of the EU Horizon 2020 research project TROPICO (Transforming into Open, Innovative and Collaborative Governments).
The article can be found here.
Julia Fleischer and Nina Reiners have published an article on international bureaucracies in International Studies Review. They discuss the current state of research on these actors in IR and PA, arguing that mostly influence, authority, and autonomy are referred to in order to explain the agency of these actors. Less attention, however, is given to the political context of these international bureaucracies. Future joint research that links international relations and public administration research more strongly may therefore benefit from actor-based explanatory perspectives and from greater attention to the (dynamic) political environment of these actors.
The article can be found here.
A well-functioning fiscal administration is a key element of fiscal capacity, i.e. the ability of governments to raise revenue from broad tax bases. However, surprisingly little is known about how an efficient fiscal administration can be built in places where it does not yet exist and with what consequences. The project "Building Fiscal Capacity" (FISCAP) improves our understanding of such dynamics in fiscal administrations. The FISCAP project studies empirically the measures taken to build the fiscal administration in the territory of the former German Democratic Republic after the German reunification in the 1990s and evaluates their potential short and long term impacts in politics and economics. Our team collaborates with colleagues from LMU Munich and University of Hohenheim, thus bringing together expertise in political science and public administration, public finance, and organizational economics.
