Structure and Organisation of Government Project

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Julia Fleischer, since 10/2018
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2014 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 243382354

Why are some administrative organizations successfully created, frequently reorganized, merged, or terminated, whereas others are seemingly immortal and become more powerful than the elected politicians that created and control them? This question has become pertinent, especially in the past three decades, within European parliamentary democracies. By the end of the 1970s, when the golden era of welfare state expansion and state growth came to an end, a new generation of political leaders such as President Ronald Reagan of the United States and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of the United Kingdom initiated a series of administrative reform trajectories - privatization, deregulation, agencification, liberalization, decentralization, and New Public Management - with the aim to fundamentally alter the scope and scale of central government and sparked off several reform trajectories across the developed and developing economies. This project develops and applies a novel framework that will systematically map and explain organizational changes within central government cross-nationally in four European parliamentary democracies, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, over the last three decades, the period following the initiation of New Public Management reforms in the United Kingdom and elsewhere in advanced economies. This project builds upon the most influential theory of the structure and organization of central governments, which is the theory of the politics of structural choice. We develop a comparative quantitative dataset of organizational changes within the central governments of these four countries for the period 1980 and 2010. We also examine changes in the structure and organization of government across four selected policy areas in these countries.The key research aims of this project are then 1.To develop and apply cross-nationally a framework for consistently mapping the changing organizational structure of the central governments of France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom between 1980 and 2010.2.To identify patterns of change, especially establish whether change is incremental or subject to punctuations with periods of greater stability between these periods, to identify convergence or distinctiveness between countries and to identify any trends within or across countries and policy sectors.3.To adapt and test the US-based theory of the politics of structural choice on patterns of structural and organizational change within the institutional context of European parliamentary democracies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: France, Netherlands, United Kingdom
• Participating Persons: Professor Philippe Bezes, Ph.D.; Professor Oliver James, Ph.D.; Kutsal Yesilkagit, Ph.D.
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Werner Jann, from 1/2015 until 9/2018